THE  LIBRARY 

OF 
THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 
LOS  ANGELES 


POETRY 

AND 

THE  RENASCENCE  OF  WONDER 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

AYLWIN 

OLD    FAMILIAR    FACES 


POETRY 

AND    THE 

RENASCENCE  OF  WONDER 


BY 

THEODORE 
WATTS-DUNTON 


NEW    YORK 

E.  P.  DUTTON    &  COMPANY 
68 1  Fifth  Avenue 


PlUNTBD  AT    THE    DtrOHimm   PRKSS,    TOMQVAY,    ENGLAND, 


College 
Library 

TN 


INTRODUCTION 


IT  was  my  special  privilege  to  be  on  inti- 
mate terms  of  friendship  with  the  author 
for  more  than  forty  years.  Soon  after 
our  first  meeting  at  the  house  of  my 
father,  Dr.  Gordon  Hake,  the  "  parable  poet," 
we  became  in  1873,  joint  occupiers  of  a  set  of 
chambers  in  Great  James  Street,  near  Holborn. 
Here  we  had  Swinburne  for  a  neighbour,  who, 
being  at  that  moment  engaged  in  the  writing 
of  Bothwell,  invited  us  on  many  an  occasion  to 
assist  at  his  readings  from  the  "  drame  epique" 
It  was  in  this  "  bardic  atmosphere  "  in  London 
that  Watts-Dunton  began  to  write  on  poetic 
criticism  for  the  literary  journals.  His  first 
essay,  The  Lost  Hamlet,  appeared  at  this  time 
in  the  New  Monthly  Magazine.  After  a  year's 
residence  in  Great  James  Street,  we  took  a 
set  of  rooms  in  Danes'  Inn  ;  and  it  was  now 
that  my  friend  joined  the  Examiner,  then  under 
the  editorship  of  Professor  Minto.  It  was 
through  Watts-Dunton's  literary  relations  with 
Minto  as  will  be  seen,  that  he  came  to  be  invited 


1181367 


vi  INTRODUCTION 

to  write  the  essay  on  "  Poetry  "  for  the  Ency- 
clopedia Britannica  ;  and  it  was  through  his 
success  as  a  contributor  to  Minto's  journal 
that  Norman  MacColl,  then  editor  of  the 
Athenceum,  "  discovered  "  Theodore  Watts,  as 
he  was  then  called,  and  induced  him  to  become 
a  member  of  his  staff. 

Watts-Dunton  soon  came  to  be  regarded 
by  everyone  in  the  literary  circles  in  which  he 
moved  as  an  authority  on  the  subject  of  poetic 
art.  He  won  this  distinctive  mark  not  merely 
through  his  criticisms  on  the  poets  of  the  period 
in  the  Examiner  and  afterwards  in  the  Athe- 
nceum. The  "  Wednesday  evening  "  gatherings 
at  Danes'  Inn  did  still  more  to  convince  those 
who  heard  his  "  talks  on  poetry  "  that  he  was 
thoroughly  conversant  with  the  laws  of  versifi- 
cation, and  possessed,  moreover,  an  exceptional 
knowledge  of  the  history  of  poetry.  Persian 
tales,  with  their  fascinating  poetic  motives, 
appealed  to  him  in  a  marked  degree,  inspiring 
the  subject  for  more  than  one  sonnet  in  his 
volume  "  The  Coming  of  Love." 

The  truth  is,  as  he  told  me  in  our  thousand 
and  one  quiet  talks  together  in  Danes'  Inn, 
that  in  his  earliest  days  he  conceived  the  bold 
idea  of  writing  a  comprehensive  treatise  on  the 


INTRODUCTION  vii 

history  of  poetry  ;  and  when  barely  nineteen 
years  of  age,  soon  after  leaving  school,  he  began 
to  devote  many  an  hour  during  his  solitary 
walks  by  the  river  Ouse,  in  the  neighbourhood 
of  his  native  town  of  St.  Ives,  to  meditations 
over  this  project.  The  ambitious  design,  as 
far  as  he  achieved  it,  may  be  said  to  represent 
the  chief  occupation  of  a  lifetime. 

When  he  left  St.  Ives  and  came  to  reside  with 
me  in  London,  he  was  already  a  middle-aged 
man.  With  him  he  brought  his  treatise  on 
Poetry  in  rough  manuscript  form.  It  by  no 
means  covered  the  broad  field  contemplated 
in  the  first  flush  of  youthful  enthusiasm;  even 
the  portions  dealing  with  the  first  principles 
of  poetic  art  seemed  to  him,  an  exceptionally 
conscientious  worker,  to  need  further  revision. 
But  finding  himself  busily  engaged  in  journalism, 
while  at  the  same  time  continuing  to  follow  his 
profession  as  a  solicitor,  those  spare  moments 
which  he  had  thought  to  bestow  upon  the 
treatise  proved  lamentably  insufficient. 

It  so  chanced,  however,  that  while  still  upon 
the  staff  of  the  Examiner,  he  learnt  from  Profes- 
sor Minto  that  Thomas  S.  Baynes  had  been 
selected  by  Messrs.  A.  and  C.  Black,  the  Edin- 
burgh publishers,  to  edit  the  ninth  edition  of 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  and  that  this 
recently-appointed  editor  was  in  search  of  a 
writer  competent  to  undertake  the  article  on 
Poetry  ;  for  the  new  edition  of  the  work  was 
to  be  almost  entirely  re-arranged  and  re-written, 
fundamentally  different,  in  fact,  from  the  prev- 
ious editions,  and  all  other  previous  editions. 
Professor  Baynes  was  not  long  in  deciding  that 
"  Theodore  Watts  "  was  the  best  informed  man 
for  the  purpose.  The  editor  certainly  had  had 
serious  thoughts  of  inviting  either  Swinburne 
or  Matthew  Arnold  to  write  the  essay,  but 
he  came  to  realise  in  time  that  both  these  poets 
had  given  their  attention  principally  to  the 
historic  method  of  criticism,  and  that  method 
did  not  appeal  to  the  editor  as  likely  to  meet 
the  requirements  of  a  publication  of  this  des- 
cription. What  he  sought  to  secure  was  an 
article  setting  forth  as  briefly  as  possible  the 
nature,  functions,  and  forms  of  poetry ;  an 
article  in  a  word,  that  would  not  occupy  more 
than  eight  or  ten  pages  of  the  Encyclopedia 
Britannica.  After  some  hesitation,  Watts-Dun- 
ton  undertook  to  supply  the  article.  The 
material — far  more  material  than  was  needed 
— was  ready  at  hand.  His  hesitation  simply 
arose  from  this  fact ;  he  began  to  realise  how 


INTRODUCTION  ix 

hampered  he  would  be  as  to  space ;  owing  to 
these  "  space  restrictions  "  he  would  be  forced 
not  only  to  delete  at  least  two-thirds  of  his 
treatise  as  comprised  in  the  original  manu- 
script form,  but  would  also  have  to  leave  the 
conclusion  of  the  argument  undeveloped.  In 
this  unavoidably  compressed  shape,  Watts- 
Dunton's  essay  on  "  Poetry  "  was  written,  in 
1884,  and  appeared  in  the  ninth  edition  of  the 
Encyclopedia.  It  was  reproduced  in  the  two 
subsequent  editions  without  any  important 
alterations.  The  article  has  been  described  by 
the  author  himself  as  "a  brief  essay  on  the 
principles  of  poetic  art  as  exemplified  by  the 
poetry  of  all  the  great  literatures." 

Meantime  the  "  principles  of  poetic  art," 
expounded  by  Watts-Dunton  in  the  Encyclo- 
pedia Britannica,  had  attracted  the  attention 
of  other  editors.  Besides  the  Examiner,  he 
wrote  for  the  Academy,  and  the  English  Illus- 
trated Magazine.  It  was  generally  recognised 
in  fact,  that  had  he  served  an  apprenticeship  to 
literature  with  the  distinct  object  of  reviewing 
the  chief  Victorian  poets  as  their  works  came 
from  the  Press,  he  could  not  have  been  more 
fully  equipped  than  he  proved  himself  to  be, 
especially  when  selected  to  undertake  the  duties 


x  INTRODUCTION 

of  leading  critic  on  the  Athenceum.  His  con- 
nection with  that  journal  extended  without 
intermission  over  more  than  five-and-twenty 
years  (1876-1902).  At  one  time — more  parti- 
cularly during  the  "  eighties  " — scarcely  a  week 
went  by  without  an  article  from  his  pen,  re- 
viewing some  book  of  exceptional  interest  to  the 
literary  world.  He  reviewed  in  the  Athenczum 
every  book  published  by  Swinburne,  in  prose  as 
well  as  in  poetry,  for  twenty-two  years  (between 
1877  and  1899) — some  fifteen  volumes  in  all. 
He  reviewed  every  book  by  William  Morris 
published  between  1888  and  1897 — no  less  than 
ten  volumes.  He  reviewed  all  Tennyson's  later 
works,  a  volume  of  poems  by  George  Meredith, 
and  a  volume  of  Rossetti's  collected  works. 
He  reviewed  most  of  Victor  Hugo's  publications 
between  1877  and  1882  ;  and  besides  all  these 
critiques,  some  of  them  filling  five  or  six  columns 
of  the  Athen&um,  he  wrote  lengthy  reviews  on 
many  of  the  minor  poets,  novelists,  and  essayists 
of  that  mid- Victorian  period. 

In  the  writing  of  these  numerous  reviews, 
it  naturally  followed  that  Watts-Dunton's  treat- 
ise on  Poetry  came  to  be  gradually  absorbed. 
It  had  been  freely  drawn  upon  for  his  essay 
in  the  Britannica,  as  already  mentioned ;  and 


INTRODUCTION  xi 

so  it  came  about  that  the  original  work  in  its 
manuscript  form  finally  ceased  to  exist,  except 
in  the  pages  of  the  periodicals  to  which  he  had 
contributed  his  diverse  articles  on  poetic  critic- 
ism. 

These  poetic  criticisms,  however,  were  by  no 
means  confined  to  the  literary  journals.  He 
wrote  at  the  request  of  the  editor  of  Chambers' s 
Encyclopedia  the  article  on  the  "  Sonnet  "  for 
that  publication  in  1891.  Again,  there  was 
his  preface  to  "  Chatterton,"  written  for  J.  H. 
Ward's  "  British  Poets  "  in  1880,  prior  to  the 
"  Sonnet  "  essay,  it  will  be  noted,  and  also 
prior  to  the  essay  on  "  Poetry  "  in  the  Britan- 
nica.  It  was  while  writing  on  Chatterton,  in 
fact,  that  he  first  struck  the  keynote  to  which 
all  his  subsequent  essays  on  Poetry  responded. 
He  regarded  that  "  marvellous  boy  "  as  "  the 
renascence  of  wonder  incarnate  ' ' — the  poet 
who  "  refused  to  be  imprisoned  in  the  jar  of 
eighteenth  century  convention."  "  Chatter- 
ton  "  was  one  of  his  pet  subjects  ;  his  favourite 
poet,  Keats,  scarcely  won  from  him  greater 
admiration.  At  the  time  when  he  was  writing 
this  "  Chatterton  "  preface,  it  chanced  that  he 
was  thrown  almost  daily  into  the  society  of 
D.  G.  Rossetti,  whose  appreciation  of  the  poet 


xii  INTRODUCTION 

was,  if  possible,  greater  than  Watts-Dunton's ; 
and  so  deeply  interested  was  Rossetti  in  the 
progress  of  the  Chatterton  essay,  which  the 
author  read  and  re-read  to  him  during  their 
evenings  together  at  Cheyne  Walk,  that  he 
consulted  every  work  on  Chatterton  that 
he  could  procure  in  order  that  he  might  claim 
the  privilege  of  tendering  his  advice  when  the 
manuscript  was  submitted  to  him  for  criticism. 
This  criticism  on  Rossetti's  part  Watts-Dunton 
regarded  as  being  extremely  valuable,  for,  as 
he  has  recorded  in  this  volume,  "  the  poet  of 
'  Christabel '  himself  was  scarcely  more  steeped 
in  the  true  magic  of  the  romantic  temper  than 
was  the  writer  of  the  "  Blessed  Damozel "  and 
"  Sister  Helen." 

From  this  moment  the  "  renascence  of  won- 
der "  became  the  central  idea  in  Watts-Dunton's 
work  on  Poetry ;  and  when,  in  1904,  some 
twenty  years  later  than  the  period  of  his  con- 
tribution to  Ward's  "  British  Poets,"  Dr.  Pat- 
rick, the  editor  of  Chambers's  Cyclopedia  of 
English  Literature,  asked  him  to  contribute 
the  Introduction  to  the  third  volume  of  that 
publication,  he  wrote  his  now  famous  essay — 
scarcely  less  famous  than  the  "  Poetry  "  essay 
— known  as  "  The  Renascence  of  Wonder  in 
English  Poetry." 


INTRODUCTION  xiii 

Acting  as  my  friend's  confidential  secretary 
during  the  last  fifteen  years  of  his  life,  every 
opportunity  was  afforded  me  of  convincing 
myself  that  the  project  of  publishing  his  work 
on  Poetry  was  never  entirely  absent  from  his 
mind.  It  was  the  ruling  passion.  Other  liter- 
ary projects  intervened,  projects  that  appeared 
to  him  to  demand  more  immediate  attention — 
those  fugitive  essays,  mostly  on  poetic  subjects, 
contributed  to  various  journals — and  the  work 
on  Poetry  was  put  aside,  for  the  moment.  But 
all  these  interruptions  that  come  to  a  man  of 
letters  who  is  also  engaged  in  professional 
duties  never  tended  to  damp  his  ardour. 

At  last  he  conceived  the  idea  of  seriously 
preparing  his  work  for  the  Press,  based  on  his 
essays  on  "  Poetry  and  the  Renascence  of 
Wonder."  The  new  work,  according  to  the 
scheme  he  had  begun  to  devise,  was  to  include 
selections  from  his  criticisms  on  Poetry  contri- 
buted to  the  Athenceum.  These  selections,  he 
considered,  could  be  appropriately  inserted  in 
the  shape  of  riders — "  Athenceum  riders,"  as  he 
called  them — wherever  the  treatment  of  the 
subject  would  seem  to  demand  elucidation. 
All  the  riders  that  he  selected  and  arranged 
ha.ve  now  been  introduced  and  printed  through- 


xiv  INTRODUCTION 

out  the  volume  in  a  closer  type  than  the  essay 
"  Poetry  "  and  the  essay  "  The  Renascence  of 
Wonder,"  which  have  been  reproduced  without 
any  material  alteration. 

It  was,  however,  it  should  be  mentioned, 
through  the  untiring  energy  and  assistance  of 
his  friend,  Mr.  Herbert  Jenkins,  to  whom  he 
consented  to  entrust  the  present  publication, 
that  this  satisfactory  state  of  things  with  regard 
to  the  planning  of  the  new  work  was  brought 
about.  Numerous  interviews  and  a  consider- 
able amount  of  correspondence  took  place 
between  author  and  publisher  before  the  matter 
was  finally  settled.  When,  however,  the  agree- 
ment came  to  be  signed  by  Watts-Dunton,  in 
February,  1914,  he  appeared  to  be  thoroughly 
contented,  for  he  wrote  to  Mr.  Jenkins  at  the 
time,  "  I  can  but  congratulate  myself  upon 
having  found  a  publisher  of  the  real  literary 
temper." 

During  the  last  few  months  of  his  life  my 
friend  was  giving  nearly  all  his  time  to  this 
volume  which  he  ultimately  decided  to  call 
"  Poetry  and  the  Renascence  of  Wonder." 
One  morning,  while  turning  over  the  pages  of 
the  manuscript,  he  said  to  me,  with  sudden 
elation  in  his  voice,  "  This  book,  which  I  have 


INTRODUCTION  xv 

always  looked  upon  as  my  magnum  opus,  is 
going  to  be  published  after  all.  My  greatest 
aim  in  life  is  going  to  be  achieved  at  last." 
He  had,  in  fact,  put  heart  and  soul  into  the  task 
he  had  set  himself  to  accomplish.  Nor  can 
there  be  any  doubt  that  had  "  Poetry  and  the 
Renascence  of  Wonder  "  issued  from  the  Press 
under  his  personal  supervision — had  he  himself 
corrected  and  revised  the  proof-sheets — the 
book  would  have  been  much  fuller,  if  not  as 
complete  as  it  was  originally  his  ambitious 
thought  to  make  it.  It  is  only  fair  to  state, 
moreover,  that  the  method  of  arrangement — 
the  order,  for  instance — in  which  the  "  Aihenceum 
riders "  were  inserted  by  him,  was  merely 
tentative  ;  and  while  adding  to  these  riders, 
which  he  had  so  far  selected  (and  he  would 
undoubtedly  have  added  a  large  number  had 
he  lived)  he  would  have  seen  to  it  that  every 
one  of  them  had,  throughout  the  volume,  a 
raison  d'etre  in  its  relation  to  the  context. 

Swinburne  in  his  collection  of  essays,  "  Studies 
in  Prose  and  Poetry,"  has  remarked,  "  The 
first  critic  of  our  time — perhaps  the  largest 
minded  and  surest  sighted  of  any  age — 
has  pointed  out  in  an  essay  on  Poetry,  which 
should  not  be  too  long  buried  in  the  columns 


xvi  INTRODUCTION 

of  the  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  the  exhaustive 
accuracy  of  Greek  terms  which  define  every 
claimant  to  the  laurel  as  either  a  singer  or  a 
maker."  Another  writer,  commenting  re- 
cently upon  this  appreciation,  has  said  that, 
"  After  reading  Watts-Dunton's  essay  on  Poetry 
one  will  probably  think  Swinburne's  praise  not 
much  beyond  the  truth.  .  .  By  a  personal, 
an  almost  emotional  quality  sometimes  to  be 
found  in  the  best  English  and  French  criticism, 
it  rises  from  science  to  the  literature  of  power." 
It  should  be  clearly  understood,  however, 
with  regard  to  this  volume,  that  I  have 
had  grave  doubts  as  to  the  advisability  of 
inserting  the  unfinished  riders.  The  difficult 
question  with  which  I  was  confronted 
was  :  Should  the  essay  on  "  Poetry  "  and  the 
essay  on  '  The  Renascence  of  Wonder "  be 
printed  as  they  appeared  respectively  in  the 
Encyclopedia  Britannica  and  the  Cyclopedia  of 
English  Literature,  or  should  they  be  issued 
with  the  riders  as  placed  by  the  author,  ten- 
tatively, while  revising  his  work  ?  After 
careful  deliberation  I  decided  to  adopt  the 
latter  course,  differentiating  between  the  original 
and  the  added  matter  in  such  a  way  *  as  to 

•  The  text  of  the  essays  as  they  originally  appeared  is  set  with 
wider  spaces  between  the  lines,  whereas  the  new  matter,  or  riders, 
is  set  "  solid,"  that  is,  without  leads  or  spaces. 


INTRODUCTION  xvii 

enable  the  student  to  read  the  one,  should  he 
prefer  it,  without  taking  heed  of  the  other. 

Watts-Dunton  himself  regarded  his  essay  on 
"  Poetry  "  as  it  appeared  in  the  Encyclopedia 
Britannica  as  the  basis  of  his  reputation  as  a 
critic.  And  in  one  of  his  last  remarks  on  the 
subject  he  has  recorded  what  is  undeniably 
true  as  to  the  time  and  thought  expended  upon 
the  essay  ;  it  seems  even  to  suggest  a  half- 
conscious  challenge — "  Poetry  and  the  Re- 
nascence of  Wonder,"  he  said,  "  is  the  result 
of  years  of  quiet  meditation  in  the  country, 
and,  for  good  or  for  ill,  absolutely  original." 

THOMAS   HAKE. 


CONTENTS 

POETRY 

CHAP.  PAGE 

I.     POETRY  AS  AN  ENERGY  AND  AS  AN  ART     .  i 

II.     WHAT  is  POETRY  ? 6 

III.  THE  POSITION  OF  POETRY  IN  RELATION  TO 

THE  OTHER  ARTS 51 

IV.  COMPARATIVE     VALUE     IN     EXPRESSIONAL 

POWER 74 

V.     VARIETIES  OF  POETIC  ART.  81 
VI.     THE  SONNET      .         .         .         .         .         .171 

VII.     THE  BALLAD  AND  OTHER  FORMS  OF  VERSE      .  189 

VIII.     ETHICAL  POETRY 215 

IX.     THE  SONG  AND  THE  ELEGY        .        .         .  224 

THE    RENASCENCE   OF   WONDER 

PART  1 235 

PART  II 269 


POETRY 


POETRY  AS  AN  ENERGY  AND  AS  AN  ART 

IN   modern  criticism  the  word    poetry    is 
used   sometimes  to  denote  any  expres- 
sion  (artistic  or  other)   of    imaginative 
feeling,  sometimes  to  designate   one   of 
the  fine  arts. 

As  an  expression  of  imaginative  feeling,  as 
the  movement  of  energy,  as  one  of  those  great 
primal  human  forces  which  go  to  the  develop- 
ment of  the  race,  poetry  in  the  wide  sense  has 
played  as  important  a  part  as  science.  In  some 
literatures  (such  as  that  of  England)  poetic 
energy  and  in  others  (such  as  that  of  Rome) 
poetic  art  is  the  dominant  quality.  It  is  the  same 
with  individual  writers.  In  classical  literature 
Pindar  may  perhaps  be  taken  as  a  type  of  the 
poets  of  energy  ;  Virgil  of  the  poets  of  art.  With 
all  his  wealth  of  poetic  art  Pindar's  mastery  over 
symmetrical  methods  never  taught  him  to  "  sow 


4  POETRY 

with  the  hand,"  as  Corinna  declared,  while  his 
poetic  energy  always  impelled  him  to  "  sow 
with  the  whole  sack."  In  English  poetical  litera- 
ture Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning  typifies,  per- 
haps, the  poets  of  energy  ;  while  Keats  (notwith- 
standing all  his  unquestionable  inspiration)  is 
mostly  taken  as  a  type  of  the  poets  of  art.  In 
French  literature  Hugo,  notwithstanding  all  his 
mastery  over  poetic  methods,  represents  the 
poets  of  energy.  Nature  has  always  been  loath, 
except  in  cases  of  her  very  choicest  favourites, 
to  combine  true  artistic  instincts  with  great 
poetic  energy. 

In  some  writers,  and  these  the  very  greatest 
— in  Homer,  ^Eschylus,  Sophocles,  Dante, 
Shakespeare,  Milton,  and  perhaps  Goethe — 
poetic  energy  and  poetic  art  are  seen  in  some- 
thing like  equipoise.  It  is  of  poetry  as  an  art, 
however,  that  we  have  mainly  to  speak  here ; 
and  all  we  have  to  say  upon  poetry  as  an  energy 
is  that  the  critic  who,  like  Aristotle,  takes  this 
wide  view  of  poetry — the  critic  who,  like  him, 
recognizes  the  importance  of  poetry  in  its 
relations  to  man's  other  expressions  of  spiritual 
force,  claims  a  place  in  point  of  true  critical 
sagacity  above  that  of  a  critic  who,  like  Plato, 
fails  to  recognise  that  importance.  And  as- 


AS  AN  ENERGY  5 

suredly  no  philosophy  of  history  can  be  other 
than  inadequate  should  it  ignore  the  fact  that 
poetry  has  had  as  much  effect  upon  human 
destiny  as  that  other  great  human  energy  by 
aid  of  which,  from  the  discovery  of  the  use  of 
fire  to  that  of  the  electric  light,  the  useful  arts 
have  been  developed. 

With  regard  to  poetry  as  an  art,  these  re- 
marks must  be  confined  to  general  principles. 
To  treat  historically  so  vast  a  subject  as  poetry 
would  be  obviously  impossible  here. 

All  that  can  be  attempted  is  to  inquire — 

(1)  What  is  poetry  ? 

(2)  What   is   the   position   it   takes   up   in 
relation  to  the  other  arts  ? 

(3)  What  is  its  value  and  degree  of  expres- 
sions! power  in  relation  to  these  ?  and,  finally, 

(4)  What  varieties  of  poetic  art  are  the  out- 
come of  the  two  great  kinds  of  poetic  impulse, 
dramatic    imagination    and    lyric    or    egoistic 
imagination  ? 


II 

WHAT   IS  POETRY  ? 

DEFINITIONS   are  for  the  most  part 
alike  unsatisfactory   and    treacher- 
ous ;  but  definitions  of  poetry  are 
proverbially  so.    Is  it  possible  to  lay 
down  "  invariable  principles  "  of  poetry,  such 
as    those    famous   "  invariable    principles "    of 
the  Rev.  William  Lisle  Bowles,  which  in  the 
earlier  part  of  the  century  awoke  the  admira- 
tion of  Southey  and  the  wrath  of  Byron  ?    Is 
it  possible  for  a  critic  to  say  of  any  metrical 
phrase,  stanza,  or  verse,  "  This  is  poetry,"  or 
'  This  is  not  poetry  ?  "    Can  he,  with  anything 
like  the  authority  with  which 'the  man  of  science 
pronounces  upon  the  natural  objects  brought 
before  him,  pronounce  upon  the  qualities  of  a 
poem  ?    These  are  questions  that  have  engaged 
the  attention  of  critics  ever  since  the  time  of 
Aristotle. 

Byron,   in   his  rough   and  ready   way,    has 
answered  them  in  one  of  those  letters  to  the 

6 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  7 

late  John  Murray,  which,  rich  as  they  are  in 
nonsense,  are  almost  as  rich  in  sense.  "  So  far 
are  principles  of  poetry  from  being  invariable," 
says  he,  "  that  they  never  were  nor  ever  will 
be  settled.  These  principles  mean  nothing  more 
than  the  predilections  of  a  particular  age,  and 
every  age  has  its  own  and  a  different  one  from  its 
predecessor.  It  is  now  Homer  and  now  Virgil ; 
once  Dryden  and  since  Sir  Walter  Scott ;  now 
Corneille  and  now  Racine ;  now  Crebillon  and 
now  Voltaire."  This  is  putting  the  case  very 
strongly — perhaps  too  strongly. 

It  is  unquestioned  that  all  artistic  criticism 
is  based  very  largely  on  sanctions  that 
are  in  a  deep  sense  conventional.  Absolute 
aesthetics  are  as  impossible  as  absolute  ethics 
— as  impossible  as  absolute  theology ;  and 
beauty  itself  is  entirely  a  relative  term,  de- 
pending for  its  acceptance  upon  the  relations 
existing  between  the  admirer  and  the  object 
admired,  as  Darwin  has  proved.  There  has 
been  much  talk  about  the  glory  of  peacocks' 
tails,  and  we  are  assured  that  it  took  the  peacock 
many  thousands  of  years  to  develop  that  gor- 
geous appendage,  which  gives  the  peahen  as 
much  joy  as  the  peacock  himself,  though  it  does 
not  necessarily  follow  from  this  that  the  pea- 
cock's tail  is,  as  a  conception,  absolutely,  univer- 
sally, and  eternally  beautiful.  That  it  is  beauti- 
ful in  the  eyes  of  the  peahen  is  as  it  should  be ; 
but  racial  prejudice  must  be  taken  into  account. 


8  POETRY 

To  the  grub  which  the  peacock  will  sometimes 
condescend  to  devour  there  is  nothing  beautiful 
in  that  array  of  feathers  which  the  grub's  own 
juices  contribute,  however  unwillingly,  to  feed 
and  support.  And  if  the  associative  origin  of 
beauty  is  apparent  in  the  natural  world,  how 
should  it  be  otherwise  in  the  world  of  art  ? 
For  instance,  in  the  matter  of  the  Venus  of 
Japan  and  Chelsea  there  are  heretics  in  regard 
to  her  charms,  just  as  in  the  region  of  Totten- 
ham Court  Road  there  are  said  to  be  good  folk, 
but  heretical,  who  see  no  loveliness  in  sage  greens. 

If  we  remember  that  Sophocles  lost  the 
first  prize  for  the  (Edipus  Tyrannus  ;  if  we 
remember  what  in  Dante's  time  (owing  partly, 
no  doubt,  to  the  universal  ignorance  of  Greek) 
were  the  relative  positions  of  Homer  and 
Virgil,  what  in  the  time  of  Milton  were  the  re- 
lative positions  of  Milton  himself,  of  Shakes- 
peare, and  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  ;  again  if 
we  remember  Jeffrey's  famous  classification  of 
the  poets  of  his  day,  we  shall  be  driven  to  pause 
over  Byron's  words  before  dismissing  them. 
Yet  some  definition,  for  the  purpose  of  this 
essay,  must  be  here  attempted  ;  and,  using  the 
phrase  "  absolute  poetry  "  as  the  musical  critics 
use  the  phrase  "  absolute  music,"  we  may,  per- 
haps, without  too  great  presumption  submit  the 
following  : — 

Absolute  poetry  is  the  concrete  and  artistic  ex- 


WHAT   IS   POETRY  ?  9 

pression  of  the  human  mind  in  emotional  and 
rhythmical  language. 

This  at  least  will  be  granted,  that  no  literary 
expression  can  properly  speaking  be  called  poetry 
that  is  not  in  a  certain  deep  sense  emotional, 
whatever  may  be  its  subject  matter,  concrete 
in  its  method  and  its  diction,  rhythmical  in 
movement,  and  artistic  in  form.  \-  *  V? 

That  the  expression  of  all  real  poetry  must  be 
concrete  in  method  and  diction  is  obvious,  and 
yet  this  dictum  would  exclude  from  the  defini- 
tion much  of  what  is  called  didactic  poetry. 
With  abstractions  the  poet  has  nothing  to  do, 
save  to  take  them  and  turn  them  into  con- 
cretions ;  for,  as  artist,  he  is  simply  the  man 
who  by  instinct  embodies  in  concrete  forms  that 
"  universal  idea  "  which  Gravina  speaks  of — 
that  which  is  essential  and  elemental  in  nature 
and  in  man  ;  as  poetic  artist  he  is  simply  the 
man  who  by  instinct  chooses  for  his  concrete 
forms  metrical  language.  And  the  questions  to 
be  asked  concerning  any  work  of  art  are  simply 
these — 

Is  that  which  is  here  embodied  really  per- 
manent, universal,  and  elemental  ?  And  is  the 
concrete  form  embodying  it  really  beautiful — 
acknowledged  as  beautiful  by  the  soul  of  man 


lo  POETRY 

in  its  highest  moods  ?  Any  other  question  is 
an  impertinence. 

Examples  are  always  useful  in  discussions 
such  as  this. 

As  an  example  of  the  absence  of  concrete  form 
in  verse  take  the  following  lines  from  George 
Eliot's  Spanish  Gipsy  : — 

"  Speech  is  but  broken  light  upon  the  depth 
Of  the  unspoken  ;  even  your  loved  words 
Float  in  the  larger  meaning  of  your  voice 
As  something  dimmer." 

Without  discussing  the  question  of  blank 
verse  cadence  and  the  weakness  of  a  line  where 
the  main  accent  falls  upon  a  positive  hiatus, 
"  of  the  unspoken,"  we  would  point  out  that 
this  powerful  passage  shows  the  spirit  of  poetry 
without  its  concrete  form.  The  abstract  method 
is  substituted  for  the  concrete.  Such  an  abstract 
phrase  as  "  the  unspoken  "  belongs  entirely  to 
prose. 

Matthew  Arnold  denned  poetry  as  a  "  criti- 
cism of  life."  If  by  this  is  meant  that  poetry 
is  the  result  of  a  criticism  of  life  ;  that  just  as 
the  poet's  metrical  effects  are  and  must  be  the 
result  of  a  thousand  semi-conscious  generaliza- 
tions upon  the  laws  of  cause  and  effect  in  metric 
art,  so  the  beautiful  things  he  says  about  life, 
and  the  beautiful  pictures  he  paints  of  life,  are 
the  result  of  his  generalizations  upon  life  as  he 


WHAT  IS  POETRY?  II 

passes  through  it ;  and  consequently  that  the 
value  of  his  poetry  consists  in  the  beauty  and 
the  truth  of  his  generalizations. 

There  is,  of  course,  little  to  be  said  against 
this. 

Yet,  it  must  be  confessed,  so  dangerous  is  it 
to  indulge  in  formulas  that,  having  decided  that 
poetry  consists  of  generalizations  on  human  life, 
Arnold  in  reading  poetry  keeps  on  the  watch 
for  those  generalizations,  and  has  really  at  last 
learned  to  think  that  the  less  they  are  hidden 
behind  the  dramatic  action,  the  more  unmistake- 
ably  they  are  intended  as  generalizations,  the 
better. 

As  to  what  is  called  ratiocinative  poetry,  it 
might  perhaps  be  shown  that  it  does  not  exist 
at  all.  Not  by  syllogism,  but  per  saltum  must 
the  poet  reach  in  every  case  his  conclusions. 
We  listen  to  the  poet — we  allow  him  to  address 
us  in  rhythm  or  in  rhyme — we  allow  him  to 
sing  to  us  while  other  men  are  only  allowed 
to  talk,  not  because  he  argues  more  logically 
than  they,  but  because  he  feels  more  deeply 
and  perhaps  more  truly.  It  is  for  his  listeners 
to  be  knowing  and  ratiocinative  ;  it  is  for  him 
to  be  gnomic  and  divinely  wise. 

That  poetry  must  be  metrical  or  even  rhyth- 
mical in  movement,  however,  is  what  some  have 
denied.  Here  we  touch  at  once  the  very  root 
of  the  subject.  The  difference  between  all 


12  POETRY 

literature  and  mere  "  word-kneading  "  is  that, 
while  literature  is  alive,  word-kneading  is  with- 
out life.  This  literary  life,  while  it  is  only 
bipartite  in  prose,  seems  to  be  tripartite  in 
poetry  ;  that  is  to  say,  while  prose  requires 
intellectual  life  and  emotional  life,  poetry  seems 
to  require  not  only  intellectual  life  and  emotional 
life,  but  rhythmic  life,  this  last  being  the  most 
important  of  all  according  to  many  critics, 
though  Aristotle  is  not  among  these.  Here 
indeed  is  the  "  fork  "  between  the  old  critics 
and  the  new.  Unless  the  rhythm  of  any  metrical 
passage  is  so  vigorous,  so  natural,  and  so  free 
that  it  seems  as  though  it  could  live,  if  need 
were,  by  its  rhythm  alone,  has  that  passage  any 
right  to  exist  ?  and  should  it  not,  if  the  sub- 
stance is  good,  be  forthwith  demetricized  and 
turned  into  prose  ?  Thoreau  has  affirmed  that 
prose  at  its  best,  has  high  qualities  of  its  own 
beyond  the  ken  of  poetry ;  to  compensate  for  the 
sacrifice  of  these  should  not  the  metrical  gains 
of  any  passage  be  beyond  all  cavil  ? 

But  this  argument  might  be  pressed  further 
still.  It  might  seem  bold  to  assert  that,  in  many 
cases,  the  mental  value  of  poetry  may  actually 
depend  upon  form  and  colour,  but  would  it  not 
be  true  ?  The  mental  value  of  poetry  must  be 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  13 

judged  by  a  standard  not  applicable  to  prose ; 
but,  even  with  regard  to  the  different  kinds  of 
poetry  we  must  not  compare  poetry  whose 
mental  value  consists  in  a  distinct  and  logical  ; 
enunciation  of  ideas,  such  as  that  of  Lucretius 
and  Wordsworth,  and  poetry  whose  mental 
value  consists  partly  in  the  suggestive  richness 
of  passion  or  symbol  latent  in  rhythm  (such  as  I 
that  of  Sappho  sometimes,  Pindar  often,  Shelley 
always),  or  latent  in  colour,  such  as  that  of 
some  of  the  Persian  poets.  To  discuss  the  ques- 
tion, Which  of  these  two  kinds  of  poetry  is  more 
precious  ?  would  be  idle,  but  are  we  not 
driven  to  admit  that  certain  poems  whose 
strength  is  rhythm  and  certain  other  poems 
whose  strength  is  colour,  while  devoid  of  any 
logical  statement  of  thought,  may  be  as  fruitful 
of  thoughts  and  emotions  too  deep  for  words 
as  a  shaken  prism  is  fruitful  of  tinted  lights  ? 
The  mental  forces  at  work  in  the  production  of 
a  poem  like  the  Excursion  are  of  a  very  different 
kind  from  the  mental  forces  at  work  in  the 
production  of  a  poem  like  Shelley's  "  Ode  to 
the  West  Wind."  In  the  one  case  the  poet's 
artistic  methods,  like  those  of  the  Greek  archi- 
tects, show,  and  are  intended  to  show,  the  solid 
strength  of  the  structure.  In  the  other,  the 


14  POETRY 

poet's  artistic  methods  like  those  of  the  Arabian 
architect  contradict  the  idea  of  solid  strength 
— make  the  structure  appear  to  hang  over  our 
heads  like  the  cloud  pageantry  of  heaven.  But, 
in  both  cases,  the  solid  strength  is,  and  must  be, 
there,  at  the  base.  Before  the  poet  begins  to 
write  he  should  ask  himself  which  of  these 
artistic  methods  is  natural  to  him ;  he  should 
ask  himself  whether  his  natural  impulse  is  to- 
wards the  weighty  iambic  movement  whose 
primary  function  is  to  state,  or  towards  those 
lighter  movements  which  we  still  call,  for  want 
of  more  convenient  words,  anapaestic  and 
dactylic,  whose  primary  function  is  to  suggest. 
Nor  is  it  difficult  to  see  why  English  anapaestic 
and  dactylic  verse  must  suggest  and  not 
state,  as  even  so  comparatively  successful 
a  tour  de  force  as  Shelley's  "  Sensitive  Plant  " 
shows.  Conciseness  is  a  primary  virtue  of  all 
statement.  The  moment  the  English  poet  tries 
to  "  pack  "  his  anapaestic  or  dactylic  line,  as 
he  can  pack  his  iambic  line,  his  versification 
becomes  rugged,  harsh,  pebbly — becomes  so  of 
necessity.  Nor  is  this  all ;  anapaestic  and  dactylic 
verse  must  in  English  be  obtrusively  alliterative, 
or  the  same  pebbly  effect  begins  to  be  felt.  The 
anapaestic  line  is  so  full  of  syllables  that  in  a 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  15 

language  where  the  consonants  dominate  the 
vowels  (as  in  English),  these  syllables  grate 
against  each  other,  unless  their  corners  are 
artfully  bevelled  by  one  of  the  only  two  smooth- 
ing processes  at  the  command  of  an  English 
versifier — obtrusive  alliteration,  or  an  obtrusive 
use  of  liquids.  Now  these  demands  of  form  may 
be  turned  by  the  perfect  artist  to  good  account 
if  his  appeal  to  the  listener's  soul  is  primarily 
that  of  suggestion  by  sound  or  symbol,  but  if 
his  appeal  is  that  of  direct  and  logical  state- 
ment the  diffuseness  inseparable  from  good 
anapaestic  and  dactylic  verse  is  a  source  of 
weakness  such  as  the  true  artist  should  find 
intolerable. 

English  poets,  perhaps,  may  be  divided  into 
born  rhymers  to  whom  rhyme  is  a  spur,  and 
those  to  whom  rhyme  is  not  a  spur  but  a  curb  ; 
and  the  two  kinds  of  poets  are  curiously  exem- 
plified in  the  joint  authors  of  Lyrical  Ballads, 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge.  It  may  almost  be 
said  that  Coleridge  thought  in  rhyme,  and  that 
he  never  adequately  expressed  himself  except 
in  rhyme  :  certainly  it  may  be  said  that  it  was 
only  in  rhyme  that  he  achieved  his  crowning 
quality  of  Naivete*.  His  rhyme  facilities  are 
infinite.  Every  kind  of  rhyme-effect  was  at  his 
command.  Take,  for  instance,  rhyme  sin- 
nhasis.  In  the  Ancient  Mariner  he  made  it  his 
aramount  endeavour  to  be  emphatic  and 


r 


16  POETRY 

understood  at  first  sight.  From  a  letter  of  the 
late  Rev.  Alexander  Dyce  to  the  late  H.N. 
Coleridge,  we  learn  what  was  the  inception  of 
the  story  of  the  "  Ancient  Mariner."  This  was 
not  the  incident  of  the  albatross  in  Shelvock's 
voyages,  as  is  commonly  supposed,  but  a  dream 
of  a  phantom  "  skeleton  ship  with  figures  in  it," 
related  to  Coleridge  by  a  friend.  Now  when 
Coleridge  proceeded  to  write  this  poem  his 
object  was  to  produce  the  most  vivid  poetical 
narrative  of  his  time — to  give  as  unmistakeable 
a  picture  as  possible  of  a  phantom  "  skeleton 
ship  with  figures  in  it."  The  incident  of  the 
albatross  was  only  used  to  furnish  a  cause  for 
the  appearance  of  the  phantom  ship,  and  for  the 
location  of  its  appearance.  From  the  first  line 
of  the  poem  to  the  actual  appearance  of  the 
phantom  ship  on  the  horizon,  everything  is 
made  to  yield,  when  necessary  to  this  end. 
The  most  effective  way  of  depicting  the  "  skele- 
ton ship  with  figures  in  it  "  was,  of  course,  to 
place  it  between  the  spectator  and  the  sinking 
sun,  which  would  then  shine  through  its  ghastly 
skeleton  ribs.  In  order  to  do  this,  the  sun  and 
the  phantom  ship  must  be  painted  in  very 
strong  colour  at  whatsoever  sacrifice  of  grace, 
and  as  the  rhyme-word  is  always  ten  times 
stronger  than  any  other  word,  "  Sun  "  must  be 
the  rhyme-word. 

Accordingly  Coleridge  paints  the  picture  by 
daring  rhymed-tautology  such  as  an  inferior  poet 
would  shrink  from.  He  knew  that  tautology 
in  its  proper  place  is  a  legitimate  implement  in 
the  hands  of  a  poet,  and  that  the  dread  of  using 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  17 

it  is  one  of  the  surest  signs  of  timid  mediocrity. 

See  I    See  I     (I  cried)  she  tacks  no  more  ! 

Hither  to  work  us  weal — 
Without  a  breeze,  without  a  tide, 

Steadies  with  upright  keel  1 

The  western  wave  was  all  aflame ; 

The  day  was  well-nigh  done  ! 
Almost  upon  the  western  wave 

Rested  the  broad,  bright  sun, 
When  that  strange  ship  drove  suddenly 

Betwixt  us  and  the  sun. 

And  straight  the  sun  was  flecked  with  bars 

(Heaven's  mother  send  us  grace) 
As  if  through  a  dungeon  grate  he  peered 

With  broad  and  burning  face. 

Here  the  poet  not  only  repeats  the  phrase 
"  western  wave,"  but  repeats  "  Sun "  as  a 
rhyme-word. 

He  realized  more  fully  than  did  any  other 
English  poet  the  fact  that  every  poem  has,  like 
a  piece  of  tapestry,  its  inner  side  (the  poet's 
own),  and  its  outer  side  (the  reader's),  and  that 
while  the  perfect  master  of  poetry-weaving 
works  so  that  his  pattern  is  developed  on  the 
outside  (the  reader's  side)  the  imperfect  artist, 
such  as  Donne  or  Browning,  is  apt  to  work  in 
the  contrary  way — so  that  while  he  himself  sees 
the  pattern  from  within,  the  outer  surface  pre- 
sents the  reader  with  the  tangles  and  knots  of 
many-coloured  worsted  which  should  be  seen 
by  the  poet-weaver  alone.  That  the  weaver 
pleases  himself  hugely  by  thus  keeping  the 
picture  for  himself  and  presenting  the  knots  and 

C 


18  POETRY 

tangles  to  the  spectator  is  obvious,  and  per- 
haps it  is,  after  all,  worth  while  to  weave  one's 
tapestry  for  one's  own  delectation.  But  then 
the  weaver-poet  is  never  content  with  this. 
He  weaves  not,  like  the  bower  bird,  for  himself 
and  his  mate,  but  for  the  outer  world,  and  to 
surpass  all  other  bower  birds  in  the  art  of  weav- 
ing. 

To  the  perfect  poetic  artist  it  is  not  a  trouble, 
but  a  delight,  to  be  continually  transplanting 
himself  to  the  reader's  outer  standpoint  by  a 
rapid  kind  of  imaginative  process,  the  effect  of 
which  is  similar  to  that  of  the  little  mirrors 
which  the  tapestry-weavers  hang  before  their 
work  to  show  them  how  the  pattern  is  being 
developed  on  the  right  side  of  the  stuff.  Yet 
Coleridge's  critical  knowledge  of  his  art  was  as 
wonderful  as  his  instinctive  mastery  over  it. 
The  rhyme  principle  of  modern  Europe  may  be 
answerable  in  a  large  degree  for  that  romantic 
luxury  and  apparent  lawlessness  of  methods 
which  have  been  so  often  contrasted  with  the 
purity  of  the  classic  style.  The  moment  a  born- 
rhymer  has  chosen  a  word  for  the  end  of  a  line 
all  the  feasible  rhymes  in  the  language  leap  into 
his  brain  like  sparks  from  a  rocket.  Some 
poets  by  instinct  take  the  first  spark  that  rises, 
and  use  its  suggestions  ;  others  by  instinct  wait 
and  select.  In  reading  any  poet  it  is  perfectly 
easy  to  see  to  which  class  he  belongs.  In  the 
heat  of  composition  the  sudden  inquiry  for  a 
rhyme  will  call  up  a  long-forgotten  suggestion 
or  thought  or  emotion  which,  though  perhaps 
partially  in  harmony  with  the  situation,  is  only 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  19 

partially  so,  and  then  sore  is  the  rhymer's 
temptation  to  go  astray. 

Although  at  first  the  feeble  relevancy  of  the 
image  suggested  by  rhyme  may  be  apparent 
enough  to  the  rhymer's  judgment,  it  must  be 
dismissed  firmly,  and  at  once,  or  disasters  will 
follow  ;  for  in  art,  as  in  common  life,  it  is  aston- 
ishing how  soon  the  judgment  will  yield  to  any 
one  of  the  other  faculties,  such  as  fancy,  imagina- 
tion, etc. 

In  discarding  the  incongruous  or  only  partially 
congruous  fancy  suggested  by  rhyme  the  rhymer 
who  hesitates  is  lost.  To  dally  with  it  is  to  be- 
come familiar  with  it,  and  to  become  familiar 
with  it  is  in  most  cases  to  begin  to  love  it,  and 
then  its  rejection  becomes  impossible. 

The  richer  the  mind  of  any  poet,  the  more 
multitudinous  and  the  more  clamorous  are  the 
(<  thick-coming  fancies  "  suggested  by  each  im- 
pact of  the  outer  world  upon  the  poet's  soul. 

In  proportion  to  the  activity  of  the  eyes  that 
see  is  the  difficulty  of  shutting  in  the  one  object 
which  alone  should  be  seen.  This,  indeed,  is 
apparent  not  in  modern  literature  only  ;  we  see 
it  even  among  the  Greek  poets,  whose  vehicle 
— rhymeless  and  quantitative — was  so  flexible 
that  the  poetic  vision  was  probably  disturbed 
in  only  a  slight  degree  by  the  demands  of  form  ; 
for  those  who  talk  so  much  about  the  severity 
of  the  Greek  note  are  apt  to  think  too  much  of 
Sophocles,  and  too  little  of  ^schylus  and 
Pindar. 

But  with  regard  to  modern  poetry  this  is 
doubtless  why  such  overloaded  narratives  as 


20  POETRY 

'  Venus  and  Adonis  '  and  '  Endymion  '  (where 
the  demands  of  narrative  art  are  completely 
ignored)  came  to  be  written  by  two  poets,  one 
of  whom  was  actually,  and  the  other  potentially 
among  the  greatest  that  have  appeared  in 
England. 

The  fact  is  that  no  two  poets  ever  did  work 
alike.  It  is  when  we  contrast  Coleridge's  style 
with  Wordsworth's,  and  the  methods  by  which 
the  two  styles  are  reached,  that  we  see  how 
infinite  in  variety  is  the  form  of  expression  of 
every  faculty  and  endowment  of  man. 

Wordsworth's  tinkering  of  his  sonnet  "  Tous- 
saint  1'ouverture"  actually  recasting  it  several 
times  made  Rossetti  say  that  he  was  no  poet  at 
all.  It  simply  proves,  however,  that  the  poet, 
having  made  first  a  rigorous  selection  of  the 
line-ending  word,  and  then  again  a  rigorous 
selection  of  the  answering  rhyme-word,  filled  up 
the  line  with  unripe  material,  which  became 
afterwards  poetized  by  the  mellowing  sun  of 
his  genius. 

Keats' s  work,  like  Swinburne's,  shows  the  very 
opposite  of  this  method — it  shows  that  simul- 
taneously with  the  rhyme  selection  comes  a  line 
of  ripe  and  almost  perfectly  poetized  material. 
With  each  poet  the  method  adopted  is,  as  we 
have  hinted,  a  matter  of  temperament,  not  of 
consciousness,  perhaps,  and  certainly  not  of 
volition,  and  both  methods  have  their  advan- 
tages— both  their  disadvantages. 

A  poet  like  Keats  and  a  poet  like  Swinburne, 
who  in  this  matter  alone  resemble  each  other, 
with  the  entire  poetic  diction  of  our  literature 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  21 

at  their  fingers'  ends,  and  an  enormous  poetical 
diction  of  their  own  invention  to  boot,  have  no 
need  to  subject  their  lines  to  the  poetizing 
process  of  Wordsworth,  for  as  regards  poetic 
material  they  find  every  rhyme-word  as  luminous 
of  tail  as  a  comet,  as  is  only  too  clearly  seen  in 
'  Endymion '  and  in  some  of  Swinburne's 
poems. 

But  then,  for  this  very  reason,  they  have  no 
time  to  consider  selection  and  economy,  and  it 
is  obvious  that  without  a  great  deal  of  rhyme 
selection  the  climacteric  goal  of  the  poem  must 
needs  be  reached  but  slowly  and  circuitously. 
For  not  merely  every  drama,  but  every  poetical 
work  from  the  epic  to  the  sonnet  or  roundel, 
has  its  climacteric  goal,  which  has  to  be  reached 
in  the  most  economical  way  according  to  the 
methods  of  the  form  of  art  adopted. 

It  is,  of  course,  in  the  nature  of  things  that 
poems  in  which  there  has  been  a  too  rigorous 
selection  of  rhymes,  as  is  often  the  case  with 
Tennyson,  are  apt  to  fail  in  inspiration,  while 
poems  in  which  there  has  been  a  too  hurried 
selection  of  rhymes,  as  with  Keats  and  Swin- 
burne, sometimes  lack  that  concentration  which 
characterizes  the  perfect  work  of  the  greatest 
masters. 

In  English  rhymed  measures  in  which  the 
paucity  of  rhyme  is  so  troublesome,  it  may 
almost  be  affirmed  that  the  thing  said  is  a  third 
something  between  the  idea  and  the  rhyme.  A 
notable  instance  of  this  occurs  in  the  conclusion 
of  Keats' s  "The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes, "which  it  will 
be  remembered  runs  thus  : — 


22  POETRY 

"  And  they  are  gone ;  ay,  ages  long  ago 
These  lovers  fled  away  into  the  storm. 

That  night  the  Baron  dreamt  of  many  a  woe, 
And  all  his  warrior-guests,  with  shade  and  form 
Of  witch,  and  demon,  and  large  coffin-worm, 

Were  long  be-nightmared.     Angela  the  old 
Died  palsy-twitch'd,  with  meagre  face  deform  ; 

The  Beadsman,  after  thousand  aves  told, 

For  aye  unsought-for  slept  among  his  ashes  cold." 

Now,  if  we  consider  how  fantastic  (according 
to  the  law  of  association  of  ideas)  are  the  concep- 
tions of  "  Coffin-worm  "  and  "  Angela's  meagre 
face  deform  "  in  relation  to  the  elopement  of 
two  lovers,  and  if  we  also  recollect  how  few  are 
the  available  rhymes  to  the  initial  rhyme-word 
"  storm,"  we  shall  see  that  it  was  mainly  rhyme- 
necessity  which  caused  the  warriors  to  dream  of 
"  Coffin- worm "  and  mainly  rhyme-necessity 
which  caused  poor  Angela  (who  deserved  "  to 
die  on  a  feather-bed  sipping  a  cup  of  spiced 
wine ")  to  have  such  a  miserable  latter  end 
going  off  "  palsy-twitched,"  with  meagre  face 
deform." 

It  is  true  that  a  revered  student  of  Keats  has 
tried  to  explain  away  the  poet's  yielding  to 
rhyme  suggestion  here,  but  I  fear  without  avail 
or  merit  whatever.  But  suppose  that  before  he 
sat  down  to  write  '  Endymion '  Keats  had 
studied  this  important  matter  of  rhyme-selec- 
tion— that  he  had  learnt  that  a  rigid  rhyme- 
selection  is  one  of  the  first  requisites  of  rhymed- 
poetry — what  an  '  Endymion '  he  might  have 
given  us  then  ! 

For  ever  since  the  infamous  attacks  in  Black- 
wood's  and  the  Quarterly  upon  '  Endymion  '  the 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  23 

fashion  has  survived  of  underestimating  the 
marvellous  poem.  It  is  crammed  full  of  poetry. 

In  the  end  Keats  did  learn  all  this,  no  doubt, 
for  deficient  as  "  Lamia  "  is  in  spirituality  from 
the  romantic  point  of  view  its  strength  and 
masculine  grip  are  very  largely  the  result  of 
effective  rhyme-selection.  And  as  for  the  great 
odes — the  most  perfect  work,  from  the  artist's 
point  of  view,  that  was  produced  in  England  in 
the  last  century — they  could  never  have  existed 
at  all  without  it. 

But  if  the  importance  of  metrical  effects  is 
seen  in  rhymed-poetry,  how  much  more  strongly 
are  they  seen  in  English  blank  verse  in  which 
so  much  of  our  great  English  poetry  is  embodied. 
Here  the  critic's  outlook  is  so  widespread  and 
so  various  that  he  may  well  stand  aghast  before 
it.  It  is  the  most  difficult  of  all  movements, 
and  yet  it  seems  the  easiest. 

There  seems  to  be  a  fatality  about  the  writing 
of  English  blank  verse.  The  fundamental  differ- 
ence between  rhymed  verse  and  blank  verse  is 
that  while  rhymed  verse  has  for  support  har- 
mony, melody,  rhyme,  and  colour,  and  can  in 
the  level  and  working  passages  of  a  poem  dis- 
pense with  mere  elevation  of  style,  blank  verse, 
though  it  has  all  these  save  rhyme,  cannot  with- 
out elevation  of  style  exist  at  all ;  and  if  the 
mere  working  portions  of  a  poem  are  too  level 
in  matter  to  call  up  the  glow  requisite  to  give 
this  elevation,  an  artificial  elevation  has  to  be 
manufactured  for  blank  verse  to  distinguish  it 
from  prose.  Moreover,  as  in  other  matters  of 
elevation  or  individual  accent,  the  poet's  style 


24  POETRY 

is  sure  to  reach  its  culmination,  and  then  it  is 
liable  to  degenerate  at  once  into  mere  manner 
— afterwards  to  sink  farther  still  into  mannerism. 
The  poet  begins  by  modelling  his  style  upon 
that  of  previous  writers,  or  a  previous  writer — 
strikes  out  at  last  a  style  of  his  own,  works  in  it, 
elaborates  it,  brings  it  to  perfection,  and  then 
overdoes  it.  Shakespeare  is  an  illustrious  ex- 
ample of  this.  He  began  by  imitating  Marlowe, 
but  finding  (what  most  likely  Marlowe  would 
have  found  had  he  lived)  that  the  "  mighty 
line "  is  quite  unfitted  to  render  the  varied 
fluctuant  life  of  drama  (being  really  an  epic 
movement),  he  invented  a  style  of  his  own. 
The  miracle  of  this  later  style  is  that  the  pleasure 
we  get  from  it  is  a  something  between  the 
pleasure  afforded  by  perfect  prose  rhythm  and 
the  pleasure  afforded  by  poetic  rhythm. 

And  when  we  consider  that  the  pleasure 
afforded  by  poetic  rhythm  is  that  of  expecting 
the  fulfilment  of  a  recognized  law  of  cadence, 
while  the  pleasure  afforded  by  prose  rhythm  is 
that  its  cadences  shall  come  upon  us  by  surprise, 
it  is  no  wonder  if  Shakespeare  is  the  only  poet 
who  can  catch  and  secure  both  these  kinds  of 
pleasure  and  alternate  them. 

But  even  Shakespeare  was  human,  the  older 
he  got  and  the  more  he  drank  the  delight  of 
faithfully  rendering  Nature,  the  more  he  felt 
inclined  to  make  the  expected  cadence  (the 
cadence  of  art)  yield  to  the  unexpected  cadence 
(that  of  nature)  ;  and  in  some  of  his  latest  plays 
there  are  often  between  the  great  passages 
tracts  of  matter  which,  so  far  as  any  metrical 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  25 

music  goes,  might  as  well  have  been  written  in 
prose. 

And  in  the  same  way  Milton^beginning  also 
with  Marlowe's  movement,  carrying  it  to  its 
highest  possible  point  in  the  early  books  of 
"  Paradise  Lost,"  could  hardly  finish  the  poem 
without  being  overmastered  by  the  style 
natural  to  his  own  didactic  instincts,  which  in 
"  Paradise  Regained  "  flattened  the  lines  and 
produced  his  mannerism. 

In  the  *  'Morte  d' Arthur "  Tennyson  had 
reached  a  style  exceedingly  noble  of  its  kind, 
it  seemed  to  combine  the  excellencies  of  Words- 
worth and  of  Milton.  And  the  blank  verse  of 
"  Guinevere  "  was  also  very  fine,  though  there 
were  unpleasant  affectations — such  obvious 
tricks,  for  instance,  as  that  of  seeking  perpet- 
ually to  get  emphasis  by  throwing  a  long  pause 
after  the  first  foot  of  the  line,  a  device  which 
Milton  had  already  made  so  stale  that  it  is 
surprising  any  successor  dared  to  venture  upon 
it.  But  from  the  publication  of  "  Guinevere  " 
Tennyson's  style  stiffened  with  every  poem, 
became  more  mannered  and  more  cold. 

Stiffness  in  blank  verse  arises  from  an  attempt 
to  hold  up  artificially  sentences  by  forcing  into 
them  parenthetical  matter,  and  so  producing  an 
artificial  elevation,  instead  of  suffering  no  sen- 
tence to  be  elevated  save  by  the  only  natural 
means  of  elevation — that  of  the  thought  or 
emotion  which  gives  the  sentence  birth. 

Of  course,  no  subject  is  fit  for  treatment  in 
blank  verse  unless  it  can  call  from  the  writer 
sufficient  glow  of  emotion  to  raise  it  to,  and 


36  POETRY 

sustain  it  at,  the  elevation  required  for  cadence 
without  any  resort  to  artifices  such  as  that  of 
parenthetical  interpolation  or  antithetical 
balancing. 

But  enough  has  been  said  to  show  that  in 
discussing  poetry  questions  of  versification 
touch,  as  we  have  said,  the  very  root  of  the 
subject. 

Using  the  word  "  form  "  in  a  wider  sense  still, 
a  sense  that  includes  "  composition,"  it  can  be 
shown  that  poetry  to  be  entitled  to  the  name 
must  be  artistic  in  form.  Whether  a  poem  be  a 
Welsh  triban  or  a  stornello  improvised  by  an 
Italian  peasant  girl,  whether  it  be  an  ode  by 
Keats  or  a  tragedy  by  Sophocles,  it  is  equally  a 
work  of  art.  The  artist's  command  over  form 
may  be  shown  in  the  peasant  girl's  power  of 
spontaneously  rendering  in  simple  verse,  in  her 
stornello  or  rispetto,  her  emotions  through 
nature's  symbols  ;  it  cnay  be  shown  by  Keats  in 
that  perfect  fusion  of  all  poetic  elements  of 
which  he  was  such  a  master,  in  the  manipula- 
tion of  language  so  beautiful  both  for  form  and 
colour  that  thought  and  words  seem  but  one 
blended  loveliness ;  or  it  may  be  shown  by 
Sophocles  in  a  mastery  over  what  in  painting 
is  called  composition,  in  the  exercise  of  that 
wise  vision  of  the  artist,  which,  looking  before 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  27 

and  after,  sees  the  thing  of  beauty  as  a  whole, 
and  enables  him  to  grasp  the  eternal  laws  of  cause 
and  effect  in  art  and  bend  them  to  his  own 
wizard  will.  In  every  case,  indeed,  form  is  an 
essential  part  of  poetry  ;  and,  although  George 
Sand's  saying  that  "  L'art  n'est  qu'  une  forme  " 
applies  perhaps  more  strictly  to  the  plastic  arts 
(where  the  soul  is  reached  partly  through 
mechanical  means),  its  application  to  poetry 
can  hardly  be  exaggerated. 

Owing,  however,  to  the  fact  that  the  word 
7rot»jT7jc  (first  used  to  designate  the  poetic 
artist  by  Herodotus)  means  maker,  Aristotle 
seems  to  have  assumed  that  the  indispensable 
basis  of  poetry  is  invention.  He  appears  to 
have  thought  that  a  poet  is  a  poet  more  on 
account  of  the  composition  of  the  action  than 
on  account  of  the  composition  of  his  verses. 
Indeed  he  said  as  much  as  this.  Of  epic  poetry 
he  declared  emphatically  that  it  produces  its 
imitations  either  by  mere  articulate  words  or 
by  metre  super-added.  This  is  to  widen  the 
definition  of  poetry  so  as  to  include  all  imagina- 
tive literature,  and  Plato  seems  to  have  given 
an  equally  wide  meaning  to  the  word  nowis. 
Only,  while  Aristotle  considered  Tromms  to  be 
an  imitation  of  the  facts  of  nature,  Plato 


28  POETRY 

considered  it  to  be  an  imitation  of  the  dreams 
of  man.  Aristotle  ignored,  and  Plato  slighted, 
the  importance  of  versification  (though  Plato 
on  one  occasion  admitted  that  he  who  did  not 
know  rhythm  could  be  called  neither  musician 
or  poet). 

It  is  impossible  to  discuss  here  the  question 
whether  an  imaginative  work  in  which  the 
method  is  entirely  concrete  and  the  expression 
entirely  emotional,  while  the  form  is  unmetrical, 
is  or  is  not  entitled  to  be  called  a  poem.  That 
there  may  be  a  kind  of  unmetrical  narrative  so 
poetic  in  motive,  so  concrete  in  diction,  so 
emotional  in  treatment,  as  to  escape  altogether 
from  those  critical  canons  usually  applied  to 
prose,  we  shall  see  when,  in  discussing  the  epic, 
we  come  to  touch  upon  the  Northern  sagas. 

Perhaps  the  first  critic  who  tacitly  revolted 
against  the  dictum  that  substance,  and  not  form, 
is  the  indispensable  basis  of  poetry  was  Diony- 
sius  of  Halicarnassus,  whose  treatise  upon  the 
arrangement  of  words  is  really  a  very  fine  piece 
of  literary  criticism.  In  his  acute  remarks  upon 
the  arrangement  of  the  words  in  the  sixteenth 
book  of  the  Odyssey,  as  compared  with  that  in 
the  story  of  Gyges  by  Herodotus,  was  perhaps 
first  enunciated  clearly  the  doctrine  that  poetry 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  29 

is  fundamentally  a  matter  of  style.  The  Aris- 
totelian theory  as  to  invention,  however, 
dominated  all  criticism  after  as  well  as  before 
Dionysius.  When  Bacon  came  to  discuss  the 
subject  (and  afterwards)  the  only  division 
between  the  poetical  critics  was  perhaps  be- 
tween the  followers  of  Aristotle  and  those  of 
Plato  as  to  what  poetry  should,  and  what  it 
should  not,  imitate.  It  is  curious  to  speculate 
as  to  what  would  have  been  the  result  had  the 
poets  followed  the  critics  in  this  matter.  Had 
not  the  instinct  of  the  poet  been  too  strong  for 
the  schools,  would  poetry  as  an  art  have  been 
lost  and  merged  in  such  imaginative  prose  as 
Plato's  ?  Or  is  not  the  instinct  for  form  too 
strong  to  be  stifled  ? 

By  the  poets  themselves  metre  was  always 
considered  to  be  the  one  indispensable  requisite 
of  a  poem,  though,  as  regards  criticism,  so 
recently  as  the  time  of  the  appearance  of  the 
Waverley  Novels,  the  Quarterly  Review  would 
sometimes  speak  of  them  as  "  poems  "  ;  and 
perhaps  even  now  there  are  critics  of  a  very 
high  rank  who  would  do  the  same  with  regard 
to  romances  so  concrete  in  method  and  diction, 
and  so  full  of  poetic  energy,  as  Wuthering 
Heights  and  Jane  Eyre,  where  we  get  absolutely 


30  POETRY 

all  that  Aristotle  requires  for  a  poem.  On  the 
whole,  however,  the  theory  that  versification  is 
not  an  indispensable  requisite  of  a  poem  seems 
to  have  become  nearly  obsolete  in  our  time. 
Perhaps,  indeed,  many  critics  would  now  go  so 
far  in  the  contrary  direction  as  to  say  with 
Hegel  (Aesthetik,  iii.  p.  289)  that  "  metre  is  the 
first  and  only  condition  absolutely  demanded 
by  poetry,  yea  even  more  necessary  than  a 
figurative  picturesque  diction."  At  all  events 
this  at  least  may  be  said  that  in  our  own  time 
the  division  between  poetical  critics  is  not 
between  Aristotelians  and  Baconians  ;  it  is  now 
of  a  different  kind  altogether. 

While  one  group  of  critics  may  still  perhaps 
say  with  Dry  den  that  "  a  poet  is  a  maker,  as  the 
name  signifies,"  and  that  "  he  who  cannot 
make,  that  is,  invent,  has  his  name  for  nothing," 
another  group  contends  that  it  is  not  the 
invention  but  the  artistic  treatment,  the  form, 
which  determines  whether  an  imaginative  writer 
is  a  poet  or  a  writer  of  prose — contends  in  short, 
that  emotion  is  the  basis  of  all  tru^  poetic 
expression,  whatever  be  the  subject  matter,  that 
thoughts  must  be  expressed  in  an  emotional 
manner  before  they  can  be  brought  into  poetry, 
and  that  this  emotive  expression  demands  even 
yet  something  else,  viz.,  style  and  form, 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  31 

But,  although,  many  critics  are  now  agreed 
that  "  L'art  n'est  qu'  une  forme,"  that  with- 
out metre  and  without  form  there  can  be  no 
poetry,  there  are  few  who  would  contend  that 
poetry  can  exist  by  virtue  of  any  of  these  alone, 
or  even  by  virtue  of  all  these  combined.  Quite 
independent  of  verbal  melody,  though  mostly 
accompanying  it,  and  quite  independent  of 
"  composition,"  there  is  an  atmosphere  floating 
around  the  poet  through  which  he  sees  every- 
thing, an  atmosphere  which  stamps  his  utter- 
ances as  poetry  :  for  instance,  among  all  the 
versifiers  contemporary  with  Donne  there  was 
none  so  rugged  as  he  occasionally  was,  and 
yet  such  songs  as  "  Sweetest  love,  I  do  not  go 
for  weariness  of  thee "  prove  how  true  a  poet 
he  was  whenever  he  could  succeed  in  presenting 
to  the  reader  the  right  side  of  the  tapestry  that 
he  was  weaving.  While  rhythm  may  to  a  very 
considerable  degree  be  acquired  (though,  of 
course,  the  highest  rhythmical  effects  never  can), 
the  power  of  looking  at  the  world  through  the 
atmosphere  that  floats  before  the  poet's  eyes 
is  not  to  be  learned  and  not  to  be  taught. 
This  atmosphere  is  what  we  call  poetic  imagina- 
tion, an  atmosphere  which,  while  it  trans- 
figures and  ennobles  human  life,  gives  it  also  a 
certain  quality  which  may  perhaps  be  called  a 


32  POETRY 

dignified  remoteness.  What  the  artistic  poet 
gains  in  dignity,  however,  he  loses  in  other 
ways.  As  a  witness  of  the  human  drama,  for 
instance,  he  loses  in  apparent  trust-worthiness 
and  apparent  authority.  "  The  light  that  never 
was  on  sea  or  land  "  is  apt  to  fall  with  a  some- 
what chilling  effect  upon  this  our  real  land 
where  men  and  women  live  and  love  and  hate 
and  strive.  There  is  one  poet,  however,  whose 
muse  knew  no  such  light — Robert  Browning. 
He  gazed  at  the  world  through  no  atmosphere 
of  the  golden  clime,  but  confronted  life  with  the 
frank  familiar  eyes  with  which  the  actors  in  the 
real  drama  gaze  at  each  other.  This  lends  his 
work  a  freshness  peculiar  to  itself,  but  gives  it 
also  that  air  of  familiarity  which  is  perhaps  the 
proper  quest  of  the  prose  delineator  of  human 
life  rather  than  that  of  the  poet,  a  subject  which 

will  have  to  be  fully  discussed  further  on.  But 
first  it  seems  necessary  to  say  a  word  or  two 
upon  that  high  temper  of  the  soul  which  in  truly 
great  poetry  gives  birth  to  this  poetic  imagina- 
tion. 

The  "  Message "  of  poetry  must  be  more 
unequivocal,  more  thoroughly  accentuated,  than 
that  of  any  of  the  other  fine  arts.  With  regard 
to  modern  poetry,  indeed,  it  may  almost  be 
said  that  if  any  writer's  verse  embodies  a 
message,  true,  direct,  and  pathetic,  we  in 
modern  Europe  cannot  stay  to  inquire  too 
curiously  about  the  degree  of  artistic  perfection 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  33 

with  which  it  is  delivered,   for  Wordsworth's 
saying  "  That  which  comes  from  the  heart  goes     . 

\  * 

to  the  heart,"  applies  very  closely  indeed          ' 


modern  poetry.  The  most  truly  passionate  poet 
in  Greece  was  no  doubt  in  a  deep  sense  the  most 
artistic  poet  ;  but  in  her  case  art  and  passion 
were  one,  and  that  is  why  she  has  been  so 
cruelly  misunderstood.  The  most  truly  pas- 
sionate nature,  and  perhaps  the  greatest  soul, 
that  in  our  time  has  expressed  itself  in  English 
verse  is  Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning,  at  least 
it  is  certain  that,  with  the  single  exception  of 
Hood  in  the  "  Song  of  the  Shirt,"  no  writer  of 
the  nineteenth  century  has  really  touched  our 
hearts  with  a  hand  so  powerful  as  hers  —  and 
this  notwithstanding  violations  of  poetic  form, 
notwithstanding  defective  rhymes,  such  as  would 
appal  some  of  the  contemporary  versifiers  of 
England  and  France  "  who  lisp  in  numbers  for 
the  numbers  [and  nothing  else]  come."  The 
truth  is  that  in  order  to  produce  poetry  the  soul 
must  for  the  time  being  have  reached  that 
state  of  exultation,  that  state  of  freedom  from 
self  -consciousness,  depicted  in  the  lines  :  — 

"  I  started  once,  or  seemed  to  start,  in  pain, 

Resolved  on  noble  things,  and  strove  to  speak, 
As  when  a  great  thought  strikes  along  the  brain, 
And  flushes  all  the  cheek." 


34  POETRY 

Whatsoever  may  be  the  poet's  "  knowledge 
of  his  art,"  into  this  mood  he  must  always  pass 
before  he  can  write  a  line  of  high  poetry.  For, 
notwithstanding  all  that  we  have  said  and  are 
going  to  say  upon  poetry  as  a  fine  art,  it  is  in 
the  deepest  sense  of  the  word  an  "  inspiration  " 
..  indeed.  No  man  can  write  a  line  of  genuine 
poetry  without  having  been  "  born  again  "  (or, 
as  the  true  rendering  of  the  text  says,  "  born 
from  above  ") ;  and  then  the  mastery  over  those 
highest  reaches  of  form  which  are  beyond  the 
ken  of  the  mere  versifier  comes  to  him  as  a 
result  of  the  change.  Hence,  with  all  Mrs. 
Browning's  metrical  blemishes,  the  splendour  of 
her  metrical  triumphs  at  her  best  [remains]. 

What  is  the  deep  distinction  between  poet  and 
proseman  ?  A  writer  may  be  many  things 
besides  a  poet ;  he  may  be  a  warrior  like 
jEschylus,  a  man  of  business  like  Shakespeare, 
a  courtier  like  Chaucer,  or  a  cosmopolitan 
philosopher  like  Goethe  ;  but  the  moment  the 
poetic  mood  is  upon  him  all  the  trappings  of  the 
world  with  which  for  years  he  may  perhaps  have 
been  clothing  his  soul — the  world's  knowing- 
ness,  its  cynicism,  its  self-seeking,  its  ambition 
—fall  away,  and  the  man  becomes  an  inspired 
child  again,  with  ears  attuned  to  nothing  but 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  35 

the  whispers  of  those  spirits  from  the  Golden 
Age,  who,  according  to  Hesiod,  haunt  and  bless 
the  degenerate  earth.  What  such  a  man 
produces  may  greatly  delight  and  astonish  his 
readers,  yet  not  so  greatly  as  it  delights  and 
astonishes  himself.  His  passages  of  pathos  draw 
no  tears  so  deep  or  so  sweet  as  those  that  fall 
from  his  own  eyes  while  he  writes  ;  his  sublime 
passages  overawe  no  soul  so  imperiously  as  his 
own  ;  his  humour  draws  no  laughter  so  rich  or 
so  deep  as  that  stirred  within  his  own  breast. 

It  might  almost  be  said,  indeed,  that  Sin- 
cerity and  Conscience,  the  two  angels  that 
bring  to  the  poet  the  wonders  of  the  poetic 
dream,  bring  him  also  the  deepest,  truest  delight 
of  form.  It  might  also  be  said  that  by  aid  of 
sincerity  and  conscience  the  poet  is  enabled  to 
see  more  clearly  than  other  men  the  eternal 
limits  of  his  own  art — to  see  with  Sophocles 
that  nothing,  not  even  poetry  itself,  is  of  any 
worth  to  man,  invested  as  he  is  by  the  whole 
army  of  evil,  unless  it  is  in  the  deepest  and 
highest  sense  good,  unless  it  comes  linking  us 
all  together  by  closer  bonds  of  sympathy  and 
pity,  strengthening  us  to  fight  the  foes  with 
whom  fate  and  even  nature,  the  mother  who 
bore  us,  sometimes  seem  in  league — to  see  with 


36  POETRY 

Milton  that  the  high  quality  of  man's  soul  which 
in  English  is  expressed  by  the  word  virtue  is 
greater  than  even  the  great  poem  he  prized, 
greater  than  all  the  rhythms  of  all  the  tongues 
that  have  been  spoken  since  Babel — and  to  see 
with  Shakespeare  and  with  Shelley  that  the  high 
passion  which  in  English  is  called  love  is  lovelier 
than  all  art,  lovelier  than  all  the  marble  Mer- 
curies that  "  await  the  chisel  of  the  sculptor  " 
in  all  the  marble  hills. 

A  poet  must  indeed  feel  with  Coleridge  that 
poetry  is  its  own  exceeding  great  reward.  Like 
Keats — he  must  seek  the  smiles  of  the  mother 
of  Hermes  : 

"  Seek  as  they  once  werersought  in  Grecian  isles, 
By  bards  who  died  content  on  pleasant  sward, 
Leaving  great  verse  unto  a  little  clan." 

And  for  this  reason  in  all  English  poetry,  at 
least,  a  sense  of  difficulty  overcome  must  be 
carefully  avoided.  Such  a  feeling  destroys  it 
at  once  as  a  sincere  utterance  of  the  poet's  soul. 

In  the  poetry  of  England,  we  reiterate,  so 
imperative  is  it  that  there  should  be  no  faintest 
suspicion  of  difficulty  overcome  the  moment  the 
singer  passes  into  the  true  poetic  mood,  to 
avoid  such  a  suspicion  is  the  first  care  with  all 
true  poets.  So  great  is  the  importance  of  the 
art  of  concealing  art  in  high  poetry  that  when 
the  imagination  or  the  heart  of  the  reader  is 
to  be  touched,  there  is  actually  a  kind  of  danger 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  37 

in  using  any  metres  save  those  of  the  simplest 
kind.  And  this,  we  may  be  sure,  was  all  that 
Coleridge  meant  when  he  affirmed  that  the  more 
purely  imaginative  is  the  substance  of  any  poem, 
the  simpler  must  be  its  method  of  presentment. 
As  instances  of  simplicity  of  form  we  can  point 
not  only  to  the  stanza  of  the  Border  ballads, 
and  to  such  poems  as  "  Laodamia,"  "  Dion," 
"  The  Leech  Gatherer,"  "  Gray's  Elegy,"  "  The 
Burial  of  Sir  John  Moore,"  and  "  The  Song  of 
the  Shirt,"  but  also  to  such  poems  in  another 
kind  as  "  The  Ancient  Mariner,"  "  Christabel," 
"  Sister  Helen,"  "  Rose  Mary,"  "  Rizpah,"  &c. 
And  on  the  other  hand  we  might  point  to  the 
"  Raven,"  of  Edgar  Poe,  where  the  poet, 
though  nearly  as  full  of  imaginative  music  as 
they  who  wrote  the  above  poems,  and  quite  as 
eager  as  they  to  touch  the  heart,  entangles  his 
strength  in  the  complexities  of  a  form  so  arti- 
ficial that  even  the  simplicity  of  the  diction 
could  hardly  warm  it  into  true,  passionate  life. 
For  when  Poe  himself  declared,  in  criticizing 
his  own  poem,  that  in  the  expression  of  passion 
there  is  always  something  of  the  homely,  he 
would  have  done  better  by  saying  that,  although 
in  poetry  of  deep  passion  the  diction  can  either 
be  homely  or  otherwise,  what  must  always  be 
homely  is  the  metrical  form. 

A  very  notable  instance  of  the  mistake  of 
using  elaborately  artificial  metres  for  the  ren- 
dering of  simple  subjects  is  afforded  by  Mistral 
in  his  Mireio — a  poem  in  its  motive  having  all 
the  simple  charm  of  Wordsworth,  and  William 
Barnes  combined.  In  a  lyrical  metre  of  the 


38  POETRY 

most  elaborate  kind,  he  describes  and  tells  the 
story  of  the  Provencal  maid  Mireio  gathering  the 
mulberry  leaves  for  her  silk-worms,  the  picture 
of  the  footrace  at  Nismes,  the  mowers,  the 
female  hay-makers,  the  hay-making,  the  wag- 
goners, the  treading  out  of  the  corn,  the  lovers 
climbing  the  trees,  the  nest  of  the  titmice,  the 
collector  of  snails,  the  girls  carrying  the  orange 
baskets  on  head  or  hip  and  laughing  as  they  go, 
the  mirage,  Mire*io' s  crossing  of  the  Rhone  in 
Adrelon's  skiff,  the  girl's  sunstroke  and  swoon 
on  the  banks  of  the  pool,  her  recall  to  life  by  the 
mosquitoes — every  incident  of  which  is  de- 
lightful, because  it  is  so  fresh  and  so  new.  This 
makes  the  special  feature  of  Mireio  the  sharp 
and  perpetual  contrast  it  exhibits  between 
matter  and  form. 

Turning  to  English  poetry,  far  more  powerful, 
and  far  more  enduring  than  nine-tenths  of  the 
verse  of  our  time,  is  "  Auld  Robin  Gray " 
written  in  the  simplest  of  all  measures.  The 
same  may  be  said  of  Emily  Bronte's  finest  poem. 
In  face  of  such  a  poem  as  Hood's  "  Bridge  of 
Sighs  "  it  might,  perhaps,  seem  rash  to  say  that 
to  English  poems  of  deep  pathos  monosyllabic 
rhymes  are  essential,  and  yet  we  are  by  no 
means  sure  that  this  might  not  be  maintained. 

For  no  one  will  deny  that  the  motive  of  the 
"  Bridge  of  Sighs,"  is  as  heart-stirring  as  the 
motive  of  the  "  Song  of  the  Shirt,"  and  yet  no 
one  will  affirm  that  the  two  poems  stir  the 
heart  with  equal  power.  It  is  because  anything 
that  disturbs  in  the  smallest  degree  the  accent 
of  sincerity  is  dangerous,  is  indeed  fatal,  that  in 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  39 

English  lyrics  difficult  metres  are  only  good 
when  the  complexity  of  the  form  seems  to  be 
disconnected  with  ingenuity — seems,  in  a  word, 
to  be  the  result  not  of  metric  skill  at  all,  but  of 
the  very  movement  of  the  poet's  passion,  as  in 
Shelley's  "  Skylark,"  where  the  poet,  listening 
in  a  rapt  mood  to  the  music  of  the  bird  has 
passed  into  a  temper  so  exalted  that  he  must 
needs  attune  his  words  to  the  very  accent  of 
the  bird  himself. 

The  great  law  of  poetic  art,  that  the  more 
earnest,  or  impassioned,  or  imaginative  the 
subject,  the  more  carefully  must  the  mere 
tricks  of  the  trade  be  avoided,  is  not  a  law 
invented  by  man,  but  is  founded  on  the  laws 
of  nature. 

Lest  any  note  of  self-consciousness  should  mar 
the  poem's  general  tone  of  sincereity,  even  the 
commonest  resources  of  the  metricist — such, 
for  instance,  as  that  of  smoothing  the  run  of 
the  lines  by  alliteration — have  to  be  disguised, 
and  by  instinct  are  disguised,  the  moment  the 
poet  has  passed  into  the  true  poetic  dream. 

Though  there  are  certain  kinds  of  poetry  where 
the  smoothing  of  the  lines  may  be  effected  by 
the  most  primitive  kind  of  alliteration,  where 
the  alliterative  syllables  may  run  off  in  couples, 
or  at  least  the  bars  of  the  verse  may  be  marked 
off  by  clearly  accentuated  alliterative  syllables, 
the  moment  the  poet  gets  into  an  impassioned 
mood  this  is  no  longer  practicable. 

The  alliterative  syllable  must,  if  possible,  be 
embedded  in  the  middle  of  a  word  lest  serious 
poetry — which,  though  an  art,  is  primarily  a 


40  POETRY 

message— should  be  degraded  by  tricks  of 
artifice.  So  conscious  of  the  supreme  import- 
ance of  sincerity  was  the  great  master  of  the 
lyric  of  simple  passion,  Burns,  that  in  one  of  his 
songs  he  actually  exchanged  a  perfect  for  a  less 
perfect  rhyme,  as  he  tells  us,  merely  in  order 
that  the  song  might  have  the  effect,  by  its 
artistic  deficiency,  of  being  the  natural,  spon- 
taneous expression  of  feeling. 

Perhaps  it  might  be  too  bold  to  say  of  Mrs. 
Browning,  the  most  impassioned  of  all  British 
poets  since  Burns,  that  in  the  "  Cry  of  the 
Children,"  and  in  some  other  of  her  superb 
lyrics,  she  on  occasion  consciously  allowed  her 
rhymes  to  run  loose  in  order  to  add  to  the  effect 
of  spontaneity,  but  certainly  the  imperfect 
rhyming  does  sometimes  seem  to  have  this 
effect. 

But  we  must  not  forget  here  the  obvious 
division  of  poetry  into  worldly  and  unworldly 
verse.  Indeed,  unless  we  do  so  divide  it,  we 
cannot  treat  at  all  of  eighteenth  century  poetry, 
nor  can  we  treat  of  nineteenth  century  poetry 
as  exemplified  in  the  poetry  of  Byron,  whose 
worldly  verse  is  alone  of  any  great  importance 
among  his  writings.  Among  the  many  functions 
of  poetic  art  is  that  of  poetising  didactic,  that 
is  to  say  prosaic,  matter,  and  bringing  it  into 
poetry.  For  this  purpose  each  literature  and 
each  age  has  had  its  favourite  form. 

As  the  mind  of  man  widens  in  mere  know- 
ledge and  intelligence  fresh  prose  material  is 
being  furnished  for  the  poetic  laboratory  every 
day.  And  the  question,  What  is  the  poetic  form 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  41 

best  suited  to  embody  and  secure  this  ever- 
increasing  and  ever-varying  wealth  ? — a  ques- 
tion which  has  to  be  answered  by  each  literature, 
and  indeed  by  each  period  of  each  literature, 
for  itself — goes  to  the  root  of  poetic  criticism. 
It  can  of  course  only  be  exercised  by  passing  the 
didactic  matter  through  a  laboratory  as  creative 
and  as  recreative  as  nature's  own,  the  labora- 
tory of  a  true  poet's  imagination. 

Of  course,  before  didactic  matter  can  become 
anything  more  than  versified  prose,  it  has  to  be 
excarnated  from  the  prose  tissue  in  which  all 
such  matter  takes  birth,  and  then  incarnated 
anew  in  the  spiritualised  tissue  of  which  the 
poetic  body  is  and  must  always  be  composed. 
Hence  it  is  not  enough  for  the  poet  to  "  use  the 
sieve,"  as  Dante  would  say,  in  selecting  "  noble- 
words."  The  best  prose  writers  from  Plato 
downwards  have  been  in  the  habit  of  doing 
this.  When  Waller  said  : 

Things  of  deep  sense  we  may  in  prose  unfold, 
But  they  move  more  in  lofty  numbers  told — 

he  meant  by  "lofty  numbers"  those  semi- 
poetic  "  numbers "  of  the  English  couplet  in 
which  poetised  didactics  were  in  his  time 
embodied — as  in  the  time  of  Shakespeare  such 
poetised  secretions  of  the  mere  intellectus  cogita- 
bundus  were  put  into  the  mouths  of  dramatic 
characters,  and  in  the  Greek  drama  they  were 
put  for  the  most  part  into  the  mouth  of  the 
chorus. 

Since  the  Romantic  revival,  however,  poetic 


42  POETRY 

art  has  undergone  an  entire  change.  Acted 
drama  cannot  now  receive  poetised  didactics, 
which  would  in  these  days  slacken  the  move- 
ment and  disturb  the  illusion  required,  while 
as  to  the  kind  of  epigram-in-solution  or  half- 
poetised  quintessential  prose  which  is  embodied 
in  the  eighteenth-century  couplet  the  criticism 
of  the  Romantic  revival  is  apt  to  consider  this 
not  so  much  as  poetry  as  an  intermediate  form 
— and  an  extremely  rich  and  precious  one — 
between  poetry  and  prose.  Epigrammatic 
matter  must  to  exist  at  all,  be  knowing,  and  as 
knowingness  and  high  poetry  are  mutually 
destructive,  it  is  evident  that  some  form  other 
than  the  couplet,  which  is  so  associated  with 
epigram,  must  since  the  romantic  revival  be 
used  for  the  poetising  of  didactic  matter  of  the 
unworldly  and  lofty  kind.  The  form  which  in 
the  nineteenth  century  this  poetic  work  has 
achieved  is  the  sonnet  which  we  shall  discuss 
somewhat  fully  further  on. 

Indeed,  it  is  an  open  question  whether  since 
the  Romantic  revival  the  sonnet  especially  as 
used  by  Wordsworth  has  not  been  gradually 
taking  precedence  of  most  other  forms  as  an 
embodiment  of  poetised  didactics.  And  should 
this  on  inquiry  be  found  to  be  the  case,  the 
importance  of  this  form  will  be  made  manifest. 

And  this  brings  us  to  the  interesting  question 
of  poetic  realism.  How  much  of  that  dramatic 
realism  of  which  prose  seems  to  be  the  natural 
medium  can  a  poet — without  neglecting  the 
demands  of  poetic  art — import  into  his  verses  ? 
Without  going  so  far  as  to  say  that  according 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  43 

to  the  measure  of  his  success  in  this  most 
difficult  poetic  effort  is  the  measure  of  the 
lasting  vitality  latent  in  any  poet's  verses  other 
than  verses  of  high  and  impassioned  song,  we 
may  at  least  affirm  that  those  poets  of  the  world 
whose  measure  of  success  herein  has  been 
greatest  are  such  poets  as  Homer,  Dante,  and 
Shakespeare.  And  as  to  unbeautiful  subjects, 
the  poet  must  never  forget  that  his  final  quest 
is  beauty. 

Although,  with  regard  t,o  the  question  as  to 
what  is  and  what  is  not  a  subject  debarred  by 
its  inherent  repulsiveness  from  poetical  treat- 
ment, there  can  be  no  formulated  rule,  yet  for 
a  poet  to  approach  repulsive  subjects  is  in  the 
last  degree  dangerous.  Almost  everything,  how- 
ever, depends  upon  the  treatment  and  the 
temper  of  the  poet.  If  these  be  sufficiently 
heroic  to  conquer  the  conditions  of  the  repulsive 
surroundings,  the  work  even  of  a  surgeon's 
scalpel  in  the  gruesome  cockpit  of  a  man-of-war 
may  become  poetic  and  beautiful ;  and  if  the 
man  under  the  surgeon's  hands  be  Horatio 
Nelson,  whispering  to  his  brother  hero  bending 
over  him,  "  Kiss  me,  Hardy,"  the  entire  poetic 
picture  may  be  sublime. 

Of  Dante's  work,  this  faculty  of  seizing  upon 
the  salient  and  representative  facts  of  nature 
and  transfiguring  them  in  the  fiery  crucible  of 
his  unequalled  imagination  is  the  prominent 
characteristic.  What  he  sees  he  flashes  upon 
the  actual  retina  of  him  who  listens  to  his  song, 
and  this  he  often  does  by  means  of  details 
which  are  essentially  prose  details  selected  by 


44  POETRY 

the  poet's  eye.  The  Dantesque  realism  is  simply 
an  attempt  of  a  marvellously  intense  imagina- 
tion to  get  as  close  as  possible  to  the  physiog- 
nomy of  nature  and  of  human  nature.  And 
the  same  poetic  eye  for  selecting  from  the 
materials  of  prose  is  seen  when  we  come  to 
consider  such  secondary,  but  still  great  lumin- 
aries as  Villon  and  Burns.  Without  a  very 
large  endowment  of  this  high  quality  where 
would  be  the  most  characteristic  lyrics  of  either 
of  these  poets  ?  And  Crabbe's  realism  is  quite 
as  true  as  theirs,  though  he  lacked  that  sense  of 
beauty  and  that  intensity  of  vision  which  alone 
brings  the  supreme  power  of  selection  belonging 
to  the  greatest  artists. 

To  write  melodious  verses  like  the  "  Adonais  " 
of  Shelley,  or  gorgeously  coloured  verses  like 
Keats's  "  Endymion,"  is  no  doubt,  to  do  a 
beautiful  and  a  worthy  work,  for  in  the  poetic 
heaven  there  are  many  mansions.  Indeed,  the 
reader  who  cannot  dally  with  and  enjoy  the 
lovely  rhapsody  of  the  "  Ode  to  the  West, Wind," 
and  even  the  golden  toy  "  Sleep  and  Poetry," 
may  almost  be  said  to  lack  the  poetic  sense. 
Nay,  we  might  go  further,  and  say  that  it  is 
in  the  power  of  producing  such  poetic  bubbles 
as  Coleridge's  "  Kubla  Khan,"  that  the  magic 
gift  of  the  poet,  as  distinguished  from  the  prose- 
man,  is  sometimes  most  clearly  seen.  For  if 
we  were  asked  to  bring  forward  the  most  com- 
plete example  of  pure  poetry  unmixed  with  any 
of  these  qualities  which  poetry  shares  in  common 
with  prose — unmixed,  for  instance,  with  passion 
or  thought — we  should  certainly  instance 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  45 

"  Kubla  Khan,"  where  there  is  nothing  but 
that  blending  of  colour  and  music  with  imagina- 
tive feeling  which  forms  the  pabulum  of  the 
poetic  dream  when  the  vision  has  plunged  right 
away  into  the  deepest  recesses  of  dreamland. 
To  show  the  power  of  writing  such  a  fantasia 
as  Coleridge's  is  to  show  an  endowment  more 
truly  poetic  (in  the  narrowest  sense)  than  the 
power  to  write  a  poem  of  immeasurably  nobler 
temper — such  a  poem,  for  instance  as  "  Lao- 
damia " — for  there  is  no  smallest  portion  of 
"  Kubla  Khan  "  that  could  have  been  touched 
by  the  fingers  of  prose. 

Having  admitted  so  much  as  this,  why  do  we 
affirm  of  Spenser,  Shelley,  Coleridge,  and  Keats 
that  between  such  work  as  theirs  and  the  work 
of  the  others  we  have  named,  from  Homer  down 
to  Villon  and  Burns,  the  difference  is  one  of 
kind,  and  that  the  latter  kind  of  poetry  has  in 
it  a  deeper  vitality  than  the  former  ?  The 
answer  to  this  question  is  easy  enough.  Now 
to  do  this  an  amount  of  realism  is  required 
such  as  can  only  be  compassed  by  a  close  study 
of  the  external  world. 

Therefore,  although  in  admiration  of  Shelley 
and  Keats  we  yield  to  none,  it  is  because  we  do 
not  find,  save  in  a  very  few  of  their  noblest 
works,  that  loving  eye  for  the  physiognomy  of 
life — whether  it  be  the  life  of  nature  or  the  life 
of  man — which  we  find  in  even  the  smallest  of 
the  poets  we  have  contrasted  with  them. 

Perhaps  the  reason  why  so  few  poets  of  the 
most  intensely  poetical  kind  have  been  able  to 
import  realism  into  poetry  is  that  the  command 


46  POETRY 

over  the  mere  poetic  vehicle  which  we  see  in 
poets  like  Shelley  and  Keats  is  so  prodigious, 
and  involves  such  an  entire  devotion  to  the 
study  of  poetry  as  a  fine  art,  that  but  little  force 
is  left  for  the  study  of  nature  and  man — that 
study,  in  short,  which  and  which  alone,  can 
result  in  the  poetic  realism  of  those  great 
masters  who  combine  all  the  powers  of  the  two 
varieties  of  poets. 

Realism,  then,  is  not  only  a  legitimate,  it  is 
an  essential  quest  of  the  poet  until  he  has  passed 
into  that  high  mood  when,  in  his  passion  of 
prophecy,  he  can  see  nothing  between  his  tripod 
and  the  heaven  of  which  he  sings.  Yet  there  is, 
beyond  any  question,  a  limit  to  the  extent  to 
which  the  poet  may  invade  the  domain  of  the 
prose  writer  and  steal  from  the  garden  of  prose 
the  proper  nutriment  for  the  poet's  fairy  land. 

It  cannot  be  said  that  "  Isabella "  shows 
Keats  to  have  had  any  ear  for  the  ottava  rima 
as  a  vehicle  of  serious  poetry.  As  to  what  he 
would  have  done  with  it  in  mock-heroic,  his 
treatment  of  the  Spenserian  stanza  in  "  The 
Cap  and  Bells "  was  not  so  successful  as  to 
make  critics  wish  that  he  had  given  them  a 
cockney  "  Don  Juan." 

The  crown  of  worldly  verse  is  seen  in  the 
mock  heroic  and  the  greatest  master  of  mock 
heroic  in  all  literature  is  Byron. 

It  was  after  the  first  two  cantos  of  "  Childe 
Harold  "  that  Byron  awoke  and  found  himself 
famous.  It  is  difficult  to  understand  why,  for 
not  even  the  after  cantos  were  good  enough  to 
place  him  alongside  the  immortal  poets  of  the 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  47 

world.  It  is  his  worldly  verse — it  is  in  such 
great  masterpieces  as  "  The  Vision  of  Judg- 
ment "  and  "  Don  Juan  " — that  his  place  is 
immortal.  He  first  found  his  true  wings  in 
"  Beppo,"  a  marvel  of  wit  and  worldly  wisdom. 
Then  came  "  The  Vision  of  Judgment,"  where 
on  the  wings  of  worldly  verse  he  soars  away 
almost  into  that  region  of  the  sublime  which  he 
sought  in  "  Childe  Harold,"  "  Manfred,"  °  Cain," 
&c.,  and  never  reached.  Then  came  "  Don 
Juan,"  by  far  the  greatest  piece  of  worldly  verse 
in  any  language.  All  these  are,  of  course, 
written  in  ottava  rima,  the  only  English  stanza 
that  Byron  ever  mastered.  Although  this 
measure  has  been  successfully  used  for  serious 
poetry,  as  in  Tasso's  "  La  Gerusalemme 
Liberata,"  in  Fairfax's  translation  of  it,  and 
with  less  success  in  Keats's  "  Isabella,"  the 
proper  moving  spirit  of  the  ottava  rima  is 
jauntiness.  The  ottava  rima  was  suggested  to 
Byron,  not  apparently  by  the  Italian  poets,  but 
by  Frere  in  '  Whistlecraft,"  where  it  is  used 
with  admirable  ease  and  effect.  From  this 
moment  Byron's  success  as  a  poet  was  assured. 
It  may  be  said  that  it  is  only  in  ottava  rima, 
the  proper  medium  for  worldly  poetry  that 
Byron  is  likely  to  take  his  place  among  the 
immortals. 

The  present  writer  has  on  a  former  occasion 
enlarged  upon  the  inherent  suggestion  of  jaunti- 
ness in  ottava  rima.  He  has  said  that  it  is 
just  as  much  an  impertinence  there  as  it  is  in 
real  life,  unless  the  poet  makes  jauntiness  a 
good  weight-carrier.  The  same  horse  whose 


48  POETRY 

prancings  in  his  box,  unburdened  by  saddle  or 
rider,  seem  so  clumsy  and  ridiculous,  looks  a 
very  different  creature  when  he  caracols  with 
ten  stone  upon  his  back.  In  seeing  a  man 
jauntily  touch  the  strings  of  a  guitar  there  is 
nothing  exhilarating  at  all.  But  when  one  of 
those  Japanese  acrobats  whose  incredible  feats 
strike  the  spectator  with  awe,  displays  his 
jauntiness,  jauntily  touches  the  strings  of  his 
guitar  as  he  balances  on  his  shoulder  a  bamboo 
which  is  curved  almost  to  a  semi-circle  by  the 
weight  of  another  acrobat  twisting  and  twirling 
like  a  monkey  at  the  top,  but  twisting  and 
twirling  in  the  perfectly  contented  knowledge 
that  absolute  safety  to  his  own  neck  lies  in  the 
genius  of  the  man  below,  then  the  jauntiness 
of  such  guitar-playing  as  that  adds  to  the 
wonder  of  the  performance. 

Now  we  do  not  mean  to  say  that  a  recognition 
of  difficulty  overcome,  though  undoubtedly  an 
element  of  the  pleasure  we  derive  from  poetry, 
is  the  most  important  element,  even  in  mock- 
heroic  poetry,  but  assuredly  it  is  at  the  bottom 
of  all  the  pleasure  we  derive  from  the  jaunting, 
as  properly  expressed  by  the  fifth  and  sixth 
lines  of  ottava  rima. 

For,  to  show  that  the  poet  can  do  playfully 
all  that  the  heroic  does  seriously  is  the  work 
of  the  serio-comic  ottava  rima — Italian  or 
English.  The  reader  should  feel  that  here  is 
one  who  could  scale  Parnassus  with  the  best  of 
them,  if  he  would,  but  that  in  the  riot  of  his 
power  he  lingers  to  disport  himself  on  its  lower 
slopes.  But  then  it  is  essential  to  have  the 


WHAT   IS   POETRY?  49 

power  before  you  can  play  with  it.  Here  is  the 
difficulty ;  and  now  it  is  that  we  come  to  the 
secret  why  the  serio-comic  ottava  rima  is  not 
to  be  achieved  by  the  mere  word-kneader, 
knead  he  never  so  wisely.  It  is  not  born  of 
artifice  at  all.  It  is  the  natural  expression  of  a 
mood — a  mood  unknown  to  schoolboys,  and  to 
poets  who  are  as  school-boys  bounded  in  their 
playground  lives — the  mood  of  the  full-blooded 
man  who  has  lived — who,  if  in  his  time  he  has 
laughed  more  than  most  other  men,  has  very 
likely  wept  more  than  most ;  who,  if  he  has 
enjoyed  more  than  most  other  men,  has  very 
likely  suffered  more  than  most,  and  who  is 
alive  even  yet  to  the  beauty  and  the  pathos 
of  human  life. 

Byron  has  had  many  imitators,  and  as  many 
failures.  But  no  one  has  written  a  single  stanza 
in  ottava  rima  that  could  be  mistaken  for  one 
of  his  stanzas.  In  the  case  of  Byron's  ottava 
rima  all  that  the  imitator  can  catch  is  the 
jauntiness.  Perhaps  it  was  his  feeling  this  that 
made  Browning  when  writing  "  The  Two  Poets 
of  Croisic  "  in  ottava  rima  adopt  the  variation 
of  the  stanza. 

It  is  difficult  to  say — judging  from  this  poem 
— what  Browning  could,  and  what  he  could  not, 
do  with  the  ottava  rima  ;  for  here  he  has  evi- 
dently been  working  in  accordance  with  some 
theory. 

One  of  the  requisites  of  English  ottava  rima 
used  for  humorous  purposes  is  to  give  it 
Italian  lightness  every  now  and  then  by  the 
use  of  double  rhymes,  and  sometimes  even  of 

E 


50  POETRY 

triple  rhymes.  Now  Browning  is  a  greater 
master  of  difficult  rhyming  than  Byron  him- 
self— the  greatest  indeed  since  Butler — but  in 
"  The  Two  Poets  of  Croisic  "  there  is  not  one 
double  or  triple  rhyme.  Why  is  this  ?  Is  it 
because  the  moment  double  and  triple  rhymes 
are  used  in  English  ottava  rima  the  jaunty 
effect  which  they  give  makes  the  poem  seem 
an  echo  of  "  Don  Juan,"  "  Beppo,"  "  Whistle- 
craft  "  ?  If  so,  it  is  of  course  no  wonder  that 
Browning — the  most  truly  original  poet  of  his 
time — should  be  shy  of  running  such  a  risk. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  jauntiness  seems 
essential  to  English  ottava  rima  used  for  comic 
narrative. 

The  fifth  and  sixth  lines,  in  which  the  lines 
of  the  quatrains  are  repeated,  are  imported 
expressly  to  "  turn  into  play  "  what  has  been 
said  seriously  before,  and  the  epigrammatic 
summing  up  comes  in  the  couplet.  If  the  charm 
of  the  poem  consists,  as  in  "The  Two  Poets  of 
Croisic,"  in  strings  of  brilliant  epigrams  merely, 
there  was  no  need  to  use  the  ottava  rima  ;  the 
"  Venus  and  Adonis  "  stanza  would  have  done 
the  work  better. 


Ill 


THE  POSITION  OF  POETRY  IN  RELATION  TO  THE 
OTHER  ARTS 


H 


AVING  now  considered  the  function 
of  worldly  and  unworldly  verse, 
we  are  prepared  to  ask  the  ques- 
tion of  the  relation  of  poetry  to 
the  other  arts.  This  was  never  so  uncertain 
and  anomalous  as  at  the  present  moment.  On 
the  one  hand  there  is  a  class  of  critics  who, 
judging  from  their  perpetual  comparison  of 
poems  to  pictures,  claim  her  as  a  sort  of  hand- 
maid of  painting  and  sculpture.  On  the  other 
hand  the  disciples  of  Wagner,  while  professing 
to  do  homage  to  poetry,  claim  her  as  the  hand- 
maid of  music.  To  find  her  proper  place  is 
therefore  the  most  important  task  the  critic  can 
undertake  at  this  time,  though  it  is  one  far 
beyond  the  scope  of  a  work  so  brief  as  this. 
With  regard  to  the  relations  of  poetry  to  paint- 
ing and  sculpture,  however,  it  seems  necessary 
to  glance  for  a  moment  at  the  saying  of  Simon- 
ides,  as  recorded  by  Plutarch,  that  poetry  is  a 

51 


52  POETRY 

speaking  picture,  and  that  painting  is  a  mute 
poetry.  It  appears  to  have  had  upon  modern 
criticism  as  much  influence  since  the  publica- 
tion of  Lessing's  Laocoon  as  it  had  before. 
Perhaps  it  is  in  some  measure  answerable  for 
the  modern  vice  of  excessive  word-painting. 
Beyond  this  one  saying,  there  is  little  or  nothing 
in  Greek  literature  to  show  that  the  Greeks 
recognised  between  poetry  and  the  plastic  and 
pictorial  arts  an  affinity  closer  than  that  which 
exists  between  poetry  and  music  and  dancing. 
Understanding  artistic  methods  more  pro- 
foundly than  the  moderns,  and  far  too  pro- 
foundly to  suppose  that  there  is  any  special 
and  peculiar  affinity  between  an  art  whose 
medium  of  expression  is  marble  and  an  art 
whose  medium  of  expression  is  a  growth  of  oral 
symbols,  the  Greeks  seem  to  have  studied 
poetry  not  so  much  in  its  relation  to  painting 
and  sculpture  as  in  its  relation  to  music  and 
dancing.  It  is  matter  of  familiar  knowledge, 
for  instance,  that  at  the  Dionysian  festival  it 
was  to  the  poet  as  "  teacher  of  the  chorus  " 
(xo/Bo&Saer/coXoc)  that  the  prize  was  awarded, 
even  though  the  "  teacher  of  the  chorus " 
were  JEschylus  himself  or  Sophocles.  And  this 
recognition  of  the  relation  of  poetry  to  music 


THE   POSITION   OF   POETRY        53 

is  perhaps  one  of  the  many  causes  of  the 
superiority  of  Greek  to  all  other  poetry  in 
adapting  artistic  means  to  artistic  ends. 

In  Greek  poetry,  even  in  Homer's  description 
of  the  shield  of  Achilles,  even  in  the  famous 
description  by  Sophocles  of  his  native  woods 
in  the  (Edipus  Coloneus,  such  word-painting  as 
occurs  seems,  if  not  inevitable  and  unconscious, 
so  alive  with  imaginative  feeling  as  to  become 
part  and  parcel  of  the  dramatic  or  lyric  move- 
ment itself.  And  whenever  description  is  so 
introduced  the  reader  of  Greek  poetry  need  not 
be  told  that  the  scenery  itself  rises  before  the 
listener's  imagination  with  a  clearness  of  out- 
line and  a  vigour  of  colour  such  as  no  amount 
of  detailed  word-painting  in  the  modern  fashion 
can  achieve.  The  picture  even  in  the  glorious 
verses  at  the  end  of  the  eighth  book  of  the 
Iliad  rises  before  our  eyes — seems  actually  to 
act  upon  our  bodily  senses — simply  because  the 
poet's  eagerness  to  use  the  picture  for  merely 
illustrating  the  solemnity  and  importance  of  his 
story  lends  to  the  picture  that  very  authen- 
ticity which  the  work  of  the  modern  word- 
painter  lacks. 

That  the  true  place  of  poetry  lies  between 
music  on  the  one  hand  and  prose,  or  loosened 


54  POETRY 

speech,  on  the  other,  was,  we  say,  taken  for 
granted  by  the  one  people  in  whom  the  artistic 
instinct  was  fully  developed. 

No  doubt  they  used  the  word  music  in  a  very 
wide  sense,  in  a  sense  that  might  include  several 
arts.  But  it  is  a  suggestive  fact  that,  in  the 
Greek  language,  long  before  poetic  art  was 
called  "  making,"  it  was  called  "  singing."  The 
poet  was  not  Trot^e  but  aotSoe.  And  as  re- 
gards the  Romans  it  is  curious  to  see  how 
every  now  and  then  the  old  idea  that  poetry  is 
singing  rather  than  making  will  disclose  itself. 
It  will  be  remembered,  for  instance,  how  Terence, 
in  the  prologue  of  Phormio,  alludes  to  poets  as 
musicians.  That  the  ancients  were  right  in 
this  we  should  be  able  to  show  did  our  scheme 
permit  an  historical  treatment  of  poetry,  we 
should  be  able  to  show  that  music  and  the 
lyrical  function  of  the  poet  began  together,  but 
that  here,  as  in  other  things,  the  progress  of 
art  from  the  implicit  to  the  explicit  has  separa- 
ted the  two. 

Every  art  has  its  special  function,  has  a 
certain  work  which  it  can  do  better  than  any 
one  of  its  sister  arts.  Hence  its  right  of  exist- 
ence. For  instance,  before  the  "  sea  of  emo- 
tion "  within  the  soul  has  become  "  curdled 


THE   POSITION   OF  POETRY        55 

into  thoughts,"  it  can  be  expressed  in  in- 
articulate tone.  Hence,  among  the  fine  arts, 
music  is  specially  adapted  for  rendering  it. 
It  was  perhaps  a  perception  of  this  fact  which 
made  the  Syrian  Gnostics  define  life  to  be 
"  moving  music."  When  this  sea  of  emotion 
has  "  curdled  into  thoughts,"  articulate  lan- 
guage rhythmically  arranged — words  steeped 
in  music  and  colour,  but  at  the  same  time 
embodying  ideas — can  do  what  no  mere  word- 
less music  is  able  to  achieve  in  giving  it  ex- 
pression, just  as  unrhythmical  language,  lan- 
guage mortised  in  a  foundation  of  logic  that 
is  to  say  prose,  can  best  express  these  ideas  as 
soon  as  they  have  cooled  and  settled  and 
cleared  themselves  of  emotion  altogether. 

Yet  every  art  can  in  some  degree  invade  the 
domain  of  her  sisters,  and  the  nearer  these 
sisters  stand  to  each  other  the  more  easily  and 
completely  can  this  invasion  be  accomplished. 
Prose,  for  instance,  can  sometimes,  as  in  the 
case  of  Plato,  do  some  of  the  work  of  poetry 
(however  imperfectly,  and  however  trammelled 
by  heavy  conditions)  ;  and  sometimes  poetry, 
as  in  Pindar's  odes  and  the  waves  of  the  Greek 
chorus,  can  do,  though  in  the  same  imperfect 
way  the  work  of  music.  The  poems  of  Sappho, 


56  POETRY 

however,  are  perhaps  the  best  case  in  point. 
Here  the  poet's  passion  is  expressed  so  com- 
pletely by  the  mere  sound  of  her  verses  that  a 
good  recitation  of  them  to  a  person  ignorant 
of  Greek  would  convey  something  of  that  passion 
to  the  listener ;  and  similar  examples  almost  as 
felicitous  might  be  culled  from  Homer,  from 
^Eschylus,  and  from  Sophocles.  Nor  is  this 
power  confined  to  the  Greek  poets.  The 
students  of  Virgil  have  often  and  with  justice 
commented  on  such  lines  as  ^En  v.  481  (where 
the  sudden  sinking  of  a  stricken  ox  is  rendered 
by  means  of  rhythm),  and  such  lines  as  Georg. 
ii.  441,  where,  by  means  of  verbal  sounds,  the 
gusts  of  wind  about  a  tree  are  rendered  as 
completely  as  though  the  voice  were  that  of 
the  wind  itself. 

In  the  case  of  Sappho  the  effect  is  produced 
by  the  intensity  of  her  passion,  in  the  case  of 
Homer  by  the  intensity  of  the  dramatic  vision, 
in  the  case  of  Virgil  by  a  supreme  poetic  art. 
But  it  can  also  be  produced  by  the  mere  in- 
genuity of  the  artist,  as  in  Edgar  Poe's  "  Ula- 
lume."  The  poet's  object  in  that  remarkable 
tour  de  force  was  to  express  dull  and  hopeless 
gloom  in  the  same  way  that  the  mere  musician 
would  have  expressed  it — that  is  to  say,  by 


THE   POSITION   OF  POETRY        57 

monotonous  reiterations,  by  hollow  and  dread- 
ful reverberations  of  gloomy  sounds — though 
as  an  artist  whose  vehicle  was  articulate  speech 
he  was  obliged  to  add  gloomy  ideas,  in  order 
to  give  to  his  work  the  intellectual  coherence 
necessary  for  its  existence  as  a  poem.  He 
evidently  set  out  to  do  this,  and  he  did  it,  and 
"  Ulalume "  properly  intoned  would  produce 
something  like  the  same  effect  upon  a  listener 
knowing  no  word  of  English  that  it  produces 
upon  us. 

Comparing  poetry  with  music,  there  is  more 
of  music's  peculiar  and  special  and  essential 
witchery  in  the  meaningless  strains  struck  out 
by  the  wind  from  the  "  thunderharp  of  pines," 
or  from  an  Molian  harp  hung  in  a  window  than 
in  any  of  the  greatest  compositions  of  Beethoven 
or  Wagner.  But  then  there  is  the  associative 
effect  of  music  to  be  taken  into  account — 
those  simple  and  deathless  airs  that  play  upon 
every  chord  of  the  human  soul  and  every  nerve 
of  the  human  body — airs  such  as  the  "  Mar- 
seillaise" on  the  one  hand,  and  "Home  Sweet 
Home  "  on  the  other. 

And  this  is  because,  although  poetry  is  one 
of  the  fine  arts,  it  is  also  much  more  than  one 
of  the  fine  arts.  It  is  the  final  expression  of  the 
whole  genial  nature  of  man,  and  aspires  to  read 
all  the  symbols  of  the  universe  in  which  man 
is  placed. 

As  to  what  languages  are  the  most  musical, 


58  POETRY 

that  can  never  be  decided.  The  speakers  of 
each  language  will  decide  for  themselves. 

It  is,  however,  pathetic  to  think  that  the 
inherent  beauty  of  any  language  has  but  little 
to  do  with  its  chance  of  survival  in  the  great 
linguistic  struggle  for  life.  Here,  indeed,  as 
in  every  other  part  of  nature's  great  scheme  of 
evolution,  no  heed  is  given  to  beauty.  When 
she  does  achieve  beauty  it  seems  to  be  by 
accident.  What  functions  are  useful  ?  What 
functions  are  useless  ?  These  only  are  the 
questions  answered  by  the  history  of  nations 
and  their  languages  as  by  the  history  of  nature. 
Who  would  have  supposed  that  human  speech 
starting  from  the  gorilla  roar  (which  Du  Chaillu 
alone  among  human  beings  could  dare  to 
render),  and  reaching  at  length  that  divine 
tongue  in  which  Sappho  sang,  should  get  no 
higher  ?  Those  who  have  listened  to  the 
nightingales  at  Fiesole  must  have  often  asked 
themselves  whether  the  birds  alone  are  to 
monopolize  the  perfection  of  speech,  which  is, 
of  course,  to  talk  in  music — whether  in  this 
regard  man  is  to  stay  where  he  is,  half-way 
between  unmusical  beasts  and  the  musical 
birds. 

If  "  evolution  "  and  "  progress  "  were  synony- 
mous terms,  would  not  human  speech  have  gone 
on  from  Greek,  (softening,  indeed,  in  some  degree 
eliminating,  those  sibilants  which  vexed  the 
poetic  ear  of  Pindar  and  the  critical  soul  of 
Dionysius  of  Halicarnassus),  until  it  became 
as  soft  and  full  of  liquids  as  Italian,  but  with- 
out losing  any  of  the  strength  and  grandeur  and 


THE   POSITION   OF   POETRY        59 

pathos  of  the  tongue  of  Sophocles  ?  Would  it 
not  have  gone  on  until  the  perfect  human 
tongue  was  evolved — a  tongue  so  musical  that 
the  moment  the  speaker  passed  into  passionate 
utterance  he  would  be  obliged  to  sing  instead  of 
speak  his  emotions  ? 

On  the  other  hand,  music  can  trench  very 
far  upon  the  domain  of  articulate  speech,  as  we 
perceive  in  the  wonderful  instrumentation  of 
Wagner.  Yet,  while  it  can  be  shown  that  the 
place  of  poetry  is  scarcely  so  close  to  sculpture 
and  painting  as  to  music  on  the  one  side  and 
loosened  speech  on  the  other,  the  affinity  of 
poetry  to  music  must  not  be  exaggerated.  We 
must  be  cautious  how  we  follow  the  canons  of 
Wagner  and  the  more  enthusiastic  of  his  dis- 
ciples, who  almost  seem  to  think  that  inarticu- 
late tone  can  not  only  suggest  ideas,  but  express 
them — can  give  voice  to  the  Ver stand,  in  short, 
as  well  as  to  the  Vernunft  of  man.  Even  the 
Greeks  drew  a  fundamental  distinction  between 
melic  poetry  (poetry  written  to  be  sung)  and 
poetry  that  was  written  to  be  recited.  It  is  a 
pity  that,  while  modern  critics  of  poetry  have 
understood,  or  at  least  have  given  attention  to 
painting  and  sculpture,  so  few  have  possessed 
any  knowledge  of  music — a  fact  which  makes 
Dante's  treatise  De  Vulgar i  Eloquio  so  im- 


60  POETRY 

portant.  Dante  was  a  musician,  and  seems  to 
have  had  a  considerable  knowledge  of  the 
relations  between  musical  and  metrical  laws. 
But  he  did  not,  we  think,  assume  that  these 
laws  are  identical. 

If  it  is  indeed  possible  to  establish  the  identity 
of  musical  and  metrical  laws,  it  can  only  be 
done  by  a  purely  scientific  investigation  ;  it  can 
only  be  done  by  a  most  searching  inquiry  into 
the  subtle  relations  that  we  know  must  exist 
throughout  the  universe  between  all  the  laws 
of  undulation.  And  it  is  curious  to  remember 
that  some  of  the  greatest  masters  of  verbal 
melody  have  had  no  knowledge  of  music,  while 
some  have  not  even  shown  any  love  of  it. 

All  Greek  boys  were  taught  music,  but 
whether  Pindar's  unusual  musical  skill  was  born 
of  natural  instinct  and  inevitable  passion,  or 
came  from  the  accidental  circumstance  that  his 
father  was,  as  he  has  been  alleged,  a  musician, 
and  that  he  was  as  a  boy  elaborately  taught 
musical  science  by  Lasus  of  Hermione,  we  have 
no  means  of  knowing.  Nor  can  we  now  learn 
how  much  of  Milton's  musical  knowledge  re- 
sulted from  a  like  exceptional  "  environment," 
or  from  the  fact  that  his  father  was  a  musician. 
But  when  we  find  that  Shelley  seems  to  have 


THE   POSITION   OF   POETRY        61 

been  without  the  real  passion  for  music,  that 
Rossetti  disliked  it,  that  Swinburne  was  in- 
different to  it,  and  that  Coleridge's  apprehension 
of  musical  effects  was  of  the  ordinary  nebulous 
kind,  we  must  hesitate  before  accepting  the 
theory  of  Wagner. 

The  question  cannot  be  pursued  here,  but  if 
it  should  on  inquiry  be  found  that,  although 
poetry  is  more  closely  related  to  music  than  to 
any  of  the  other  arts,  yet  the  power  over  verbal 
melody  at  its  very  highest  is  so  all-sufficing  to 
its  possessor,  as  in  the  case  of  Shelley  and 
Coleridge  that  absolute  music  becomes  a  super- 
fluity, this  would  be  another  illustration  of 
that  intense  egoism  and  concentration  of  force 
— the  impulse  of  all  high  artistic  energy — which 
is  required  in  order  to  achieve  the  rarest  miracles 
of  art. 

It  could  easily  be  proved  that  the  structural 
difference  between  poetry  and  prose  is  funda- 
mental. Among  the  many  delights  which  we 
get  from  the  mere  form  of  what  is  technically 
called  Poetry,  the  chief,  perhaps,  is  expectation 
and  the  fulfilment  of  expectation.  This  is 
very  obvious  in  rhymed  verse,  having  familiar- 
ized ourselves  with  the  arrangement  of  the 
poet's  rhymes,  we  take  pleasure  in  expecting 
a  recurrence  of  these  rhymes  according  to  this 
arrangement.  In  blank  verse  the  law  of  ex- 


62  POETRY 

pectation  is  less  apparent.  Yet  it  is  none  the 
less  operative.  Having  familiarized  ourselves 
with  the  poet's  rhythm,  having  found  that 
iambic  foot  succeeds  iambic  foot,  and  that 
whenever  the  iambic  waves  have  begun  to  grow 
monotonous,  variations  occur — trochaic,  ana- 
paestic, dactylic — according  to  the  law  which 
governs  the  ear  of  this  individual  poet ;  we, 
half  consciously,  expect  at  certain  intervals 
these  variations,  and  are  delighted  when  our 
expectations  are  fulfilled.  And  our  delight  is 
augmented  if  also  our  expectations  with  regard 
to  caesuric  effects  are  realised  in  the  same  pro- 
portions. Having,  for  instance,  learned,  half 
unconsciously,  that  the  poet  has  an  ear  for  a 
particular  kind  of  pause,  that  he  delights,  let 
us  say,  to  throw  his  pause  after  the  third  foot 
of  the  sequence, — we  expect  that,  whatever  may 
be  the  arrangement  of  the  early  pauses  with 
regard  to  the  initial  foot  of  any  sequence, — there 
must  be,  not  far  ahead,  that  climacteric  third- 
foot  pause  up  to  which  all  the  other  pauses  have 
been  tending,  and  upon  which  the  ear  and  the 
soul  of  the  reader  shall  be  allowed  to  rest  to  take 
breath  for  future  flights.  And  when  this  ex- 
pectation of  caesuric  effects  is  thus  gratified,  or 
gratified  in  a  more  subtle  way,  by  an  arrange- 
ment of  earlier  semi-pauses,  which  obviates  the 
necessity  of  the  too  frequent  recurrence  of  this 
final  third-foot  pause,  the  full  pleasure  of  poetic 
effects  is  the  result.  In  other  words,  a  large 
proportion  of  the  pleasure  we  derive  from 
poetry  is  in  the  recognition  of  law.  The  more 
obvious  and  formulated  is  the  law, — nay,  the 


THE   POSITION   OF  POETRY        63 

more  arbitrary  and  Draconian — the  more 
pleasure  it  gives  to  the  uncultivated  ear.  This 
is  why  uneducated  people  may  delight  in  rhyme, 
and  yet  have  no  ear  at  all  for  blank  verse  ; 
this  is  why  the  savage,  who  has  not  even  an  ear 
for  rhyme,  takes  pleasure  in  such  unmistakable 
rhythm  as  that  of  his  tom-tom.  But,  as  the  ear 
becomes  more  cultivated,  it  demands  that  these 
indications  of  law  should  be  more  and  more 
subtle,  till  at  last  recognised  law  itself  may 
become  a  tyranny  and  a  burden.  He  who  will 
read  Shakespeare's  plays  chronologically,  as  far 
as  that  is  practicable  from  "  Love's  Labour's 
Lost  "  to  the  "  Tempest,"  will  have  no  difficulty 
in  seeing  precisely  what  we  mean.  In  literature, 
as  in  social  life,  the  progress  is  from  lawless 
freedom,  through  tyranny,  to  freedom  that  is 
lawful. 

There  are  indications  already  that  this  axiom 
is  likely  to  be  acted  upon  by  the  poets  of  the 
twentieth  century,  but  they  must  mind  that 
they  do  not  carry  it  too  far ;  lawless  freedom 
may  become  anarchy. 

With  regard  to  the  relation  of  poetry  to  prose, 
Coleridge  once  asserted  in  conversation  that 
the  real  antithesis  of  poetry  was  not  prose  but 
science.  And  if  he  was  right  the  difference  in 
kind  lies,  not  between  the  poet  and  the  prose 
writer,  but  between  the  literary  artist  (the  man 
whose  instinct  is  to  manipulate  language)  and 
the  man  of  facts  and  of  action  whose  instinct 
impels  him  to  act,  or,  if  not  to  act,  to  inquire. 


64  POETRY 

One  thing  is  at  least  certain,  that  prose,  how- 
ever fervid  and  emotional  it  may  become,  must 
always  be  directed,  or  seem  to  be  directed  by 
the  reins  of  logic.  Or,  to  vary  the  metaphor, 
like  a  captive  balloon  it  can  never  really  leave 
the  earth. 

Indeed,  with  the  literature  of  knowledge  as 
opposed  to  the  literature  of  power  poetry  has 
nothing  to  do.  Facts  have  no  place  in  poetry 
until  they  are  brought  into  relation  with  the 
human  soul.  But  a  mere  catalogue  of  ships 
may  become  poetical  if  it  tends  to  show  the 
strength  and  pride  and  glory  of  the  warriors 
who  invested  Troy  ;  a  detailed  description  of 
the  designs  upon  a  shield,  however  beautiful 
and  poetical  in  itself,  becomes  still  more  so  if  it 
tends  to  show  the  skill  of  the  divine  artificer 
and  the  invincible  splendour  of  a  hero  like 
Achilles.  But  mere  dry  exactitude  of  imitation 
is  not  for  poetry,  but  for  "  loosened  speech," 
as  the  Greeks  called  prose.  Hence,  most  of  the 
so-called  poetry  of  Hesiod  is  not  poetry  at  all. 
The  Muses  who  spoke  to  him  about  "  truth  " 
on  Mount  Helicon  made  the  common  mistake 
of  confounding  fact  with  truth. 

And  here  we  touch  upon  a  very  important 
matter.  The  reason  why  in  prose  speech  is 


THE   POSITION   OF   POETRY        65 

loosened  is  that,  untrammelled  by  the  laws  of 
metre,  language  is  able  with  more  exactitude 
to  imitate  nature,  though  of  course  speech,  even 
when  "  loosened  "  cannot,  when  actual  sensible 
objects  are  to  be  depicted,  compete  in  any  real 
degree  with  the  plastic  arts  in  accuracy  of 
imitation,  for  the  simple  reason  that  its  media 
are  not  colours  nor  solids,  but  symbols — 
arbitrary  symbols  which  can  be  made  to  in- 
dicate, but  never  to  reproduce  colours  and 
solids.  Accuracy  of  imitation  is  the  first  re- 
quisite of  prose.  But  the  moment  language  has 
to  be  governed  by  the  laws  of  metre — the 
moment  the  conflict  begins  between  the  claims 
of  verbal  music  and  the  claims  of  colour  and 
form — then  prosaic  accuracy  has  to  yield, 
sharpness  of  outline,  mere  fidelity  of  imitation, 
such  as  is  within  the  compass  of  prose,  have 
in  some  degree  to  be  sacrificed.  But,  just  as 
with  regard  to  the  relations  between  poetry  and 
music  the  greatest  master  is  he  who  borrows 
the  most  that  can  be  borrowed  from  music, 
and  loses  the  least  that  can  be  lost  from  metre, 
so  with  regard  to  the  relations  between  poetry 
and  prose  the  greatest  master  is  he  who  borrows 
the  most  that  can  be  borrowed  from  prose  and 
loses  the  least  that  can  be  lost  from  verse.  No 


66  POETRY 

doubt  this  is  what  every  poet  tries  to  do  by 
instinct ;  but  some  sacrifice  on  either  side  there 
must  be,  and,  with  regard  to  poetry  and  prose, 
modern  poets  at  least  might  be  divided  into 
those  who  make  picturesqueness  yield  to  verbal 
melody,  and  those  who  make  verbal  melody 
yield  to  picturesqueness. 

With  one  class  of  poets,  fine  as  is  perhaps  the 
melody,  it  is  made  subservient  to  outline  or  to 
colour ;  with  the  other  class  colour  and  outline 
both  yield  to  metre.  The  chief  aim  of  the  first- 
class  is  to  paint  a  picture  ;  the  chief  aim  of  the 
second  is  to  sing  a  song.  Weber,  in  driving 
through  a  beautiful  country  could  only  enjoy 
its  beauty  by  translating  it  into  music.  The 
same  may  be  said  of  some  poets  with  regard  to 
verbal  melody.  The  supreme  artist,  however, 
is  he  whose  pictorial  and  musical  power  are  so 
interfused  that  each  seems  born  of  the  other, 
as  is  the  case  with  Sappho,  Homer,  ^Eschylus, 
Sophocles,  and  indeed  most  of  the  Greek  poets. 

Among  our  own  poets  (leaving  the  two 
supreme  masters  undiscussed)  Keats  and  Cole- 
ridge have  certainly  done  this.  The  colour 
seems  born  of  the  music,  and  the  music  born 
of  the  colour.  In  French  poetry  the  same 
triumph  has  been  achieved  in  Victor  Hugo's 


THE   POSITION   OF   POETRY        67 

magnificent  poem  "  En  Marchant  la  Nuit  dans 
un  Bois,"  which,  as  a  rendering  through  verbal 
music  of  the  witchery  of  nature,  stands  alone 
in  the  poetry  of  France.  For  there  the  poet 
conquers  that  crowning  difficulty  we  have  been 
alluding  to,  the  difficulty  of  stealing  from  prose 
as  much  distinctness  of  colour  and  clearness  of 
outline  as  can  be  imported  into  verse  with  as 
little  sacrifice  as  possible  of  melody. 

But  to  return  to  the  general  relations  of  poetry 
to  prose.  If  poetry  can  in  some  degree  invade 
the  domain  of  prose,  so  on  the  other  hand  prose 
can  at  times  invade  the  domain  of  poetry,  and 
no  doubt  the  prose  of  Plato — what  is  called 
poetical  prose — is  a  legitimate  form  of  art. 
Poetry,  the  earliest  form  of  literature,  is  also 
the  final  and  ideal  form  of  all  pure  literature  ; 
and  when  Landor  insists  that  poetry  and 
poetical  prose  are  antagonistic,  we  must  re- 
member that  Lan dor's  judgments  are  mostly 
based  on  feelmg,  and  that  his  hatred  of  Plato 
would  be  quite  sufficient  basis  with  him  for  an 
entire  system  of  criticism  upon  poetical  prose. 
As  with  Carlyle,  there  seems  to  have  been  a 
time  in  his  life  xvhen  Plato  (who  of  course  is  the 
great  figure  standing  between  the  two  arts  of 
metre  and  loosened  speech)  had  serious  thoughts 


68  POETRY 

of  becoming  a  poet.  And  perhaps  like  Carlyle, 
having  the  good  sense  to  see  his  true  function, 
he  himself  desisted  from  writing,  and  strictly 
forbade  other  men  to  write  in  verse. 

If  we  consider  this,  and  if  we  consider  that 
certain  of  the  great  English  masters  of  poetic 
prose  of  the  seventeenth  century  were  appar- 
ently as  incapable  of  writing  in  metre  as  their 
followers  Richter  and  Carlyle,  we  shall  hardly 
escape  the  conclusion  on  the  one  hand  that  the 
faculty  of  writing  poetry  is  quite  another 
faculty  than  that  of  producing  work  in  the 
kindred  art  of  prose. 

If  we  confess — as  we  are  going  to  confess — 
that  poetry,  howsoever  powerful,  sometimes 
fails  to  give  us  the  pleasure  we  ask  from 
a  poet,  we  know  exactly  the  kind  of  answer 
that  will  be  in  store  for  us.  It  will  be  said 
"  The  Question  as  to  what  subjects  are, 
and  what  subjects  are  not  fit  for  poetic  treat- 
ment is  one  which  will  never  be  settled,  for  in 
these  matters  a  great  deal  must  depend  upon 
temperament." 

Without  again  going  over  the  old  ground  of 
the  quaint  American  heresy  which  seems  to 
affirm  that  the  great  masters  of  metrical  music, 
from  Homer  to  Tennyson  and  Swinburne,  have 
been  blowing  through  penny  trumpets  "  feudal 
ideas "  (whatever  "  feudal  ideas "  may  be), 
and  that  the  more  unmetrical  the  lines  the 
more  free  do  they  become  from  the  penny 


THE   POSITION   OF   POETRY        69 

trumpet  and  the  "  feudal  ideas,"  we  may  say 
this  in  reference  to  all  metrical  structures, 
whether  quantitative  or  accentual,  whether 
rhymed  or  unrhymed — that  where  the  caesura 
at  the  end  of  a  verse,  whether  a  rhyme  caesura 
or  a  quantitative  caesura,  is  so  strong  that  the 
ear  expects  a  certain  kind  of  responsive  em- 
phasis in  the  subsequent  verse  or  verses,  the 
expectation  must  be  gratified,  or  there  is  artistic 
failure.  This  is  why,  when  in  modern  versifi- 
cation quantity  came  to  be  supplanted  by 
accent,  so  many  language?  adopted  alliteration, 
or  assonance,  or  rhyme.  And  as  regards  English 
poetry,  the  moment  that  rhyme  emphasis  sup- 
planted the  alliterative  emphasis  which  preceded 
it,  rhymeless  verses  became  impossible,  save  in 
the  measure  we  call  "  fluent  blank  verse." 

As  for  such  so-called  rhythmical  movements 
as  we  get  in  "  The  Lily  and  the  Bee,"  "  Pro- 
verbial Philosophy,"  "  Leaves  of  Grass,"  etc., 
these  have,  apparently,  nothing  whatever  to  do 
with  what  Chaucer  in  the  "  House  of  Fame  " 
calls  cadence — if  we  may  judge  from  the  "  Tale 
of  Milibceus." 

What  Chaucer  meant  by  "cadence"  was 
evidently  a  kind  of  measured  prose  with  no 
pretensions  to  metrical  structure,  though,  being 
measured,  it  was  enabled  to  escape  at  will  that 
severe  logical  sequence  demanded  in  all  purely 
prose  compositions.  But  in  each  of  the  modern 
cases  instanced  above  the  writer  endeavours  to 
escape  the  conditions  of  both  prose  and  verse — 
endeavours  to  escape,  that  is  to  say,  the  logical 
march  of  the  one  and  the  metric  scheme  of  the 


70  POETRY 

other.  They  are,  indeed,  caricatures  of  Bible 
rhythm — that  divine  movement  compared  with 
which  even  the  music  of  Shakespeare  and  Milton 
seems  almost  jejune — the  movement  which,  as 
Selden  has  said,  was  the  happy  result  of  the 
translators  endeavouring  to  give  in  English  the 
bars  of  the  sense-rhythm  of  the  original.  "  The 
Bible,"  says  he,  "  is  rather  translated  into 
English  words  than  into  English  phrase.  The 
Hebraisms  are  kept,  and  the  phrase  of  that 
language  is  kept." 

To  discuss  the  metrical  movements  of  the 
most  famous  innovator  in  this  line,  Walt.  Whit- 
man, has  become  positively  painful,  especially 
to  those  who  sympathise  with  the  liberal  and 
generous  views  these  innovations  embody  ;  but 
it  would  be  uncandid  to  shrink  from  saying 
that  the  endeavour  to  imitate  this  movement 
of  our  sublime  English  Bible  in  poems  where  the 
jargon  of  the  slums  is  mixed  up  with  Bible 
phraseology  and  bad  Spanish  and  worse  French 
is  a  sacrilege  which  every  lover  of  the  Bible 
finds  it  hard  to  condone.  Some  rhymeless 
verses,  however,  are  not  caricatures  of  this 
kind  :  some  are  governed  by  a  stanzaic  law 
which  is  something  like  that  governing  the 
"  Kalevala  "  rhythm  of  Longfellow's  rhymeless 
verses.  Its  effect  is  to  enfeeble  the  substance, 
however  strong.  A  trochee  at  the  end  of  even 
a  long  English  verse  is  so  strong  that  the  ear 
demands  a  rhyme  response.  But  in  short  lines 
this  demand  becomes  quite  inexorable. 

In  judging  of  any  young  and  inexperienced 
adventurer  on  Parnassus  the  first  thing  after 


enquiring  into  his  merits  is  to  inquire  whether 
such  defects  as  he  displays  come  from  mere 
inexperience,  or  from  the  fact  that  his  metric 
art  is  the  art  of  arithmetic — his  rhythmic  rule 
the  cobbler's  "  rule  of  thumb."  And  perhaps 
there  is  no  more  infallible  sign  of  the  poetaster 
who  rhymes  not  because  a  natural  impulse 
forces  him  to  rhyme,  but  because  other  people 
rhyme,  than  his  horror  of  "  fluent  rhyming  " 
and  his  love  of  "  hard  rhyming  "  on  all  occasions. 
Such  a  poet  goes  to  his  work  in  exactly  the  same 
spirit  that  the  mathematician  goes  to  his  lines 
and  angles.  He  has  sufficient  apprehension  of 
the  sounds  of  his  mother  tongue  to  perceive 
that  while  "  Jove  "  is  a  hard  rhyme  to  "  love," 
"  move,"  and  "grove  "  are  not ;  and  that  while 
"  dome  "  is  a  hard  rhyme  to  "  home,"  "  come  " 
is  not.  Even  he  can  perceive  this  ;  and  at  once 
he  feels  that  he  has  made  a  discovery.  He 
takes  a  solemn  oath  that  nothing  on  earth  shall 
induce  him  to  use  the  makeshift  rhymes  of 
Shakespeare  and  the  rest ;  that  nothing  on  earth 
shall  ever  induce  him  to  write  such  a  stanza 
as  : — 

Strong    son    of    God,    immortal    love, 
Whom  we,  that  have  not  seen  thy  face, 
By  faith,  and  faith  alone,  embrace, 

Believing  where  we  cannot  prove — 

when  it  is  so  easy  to  rhyme  "  love "  with 
"  above,"  or  "  glove,"  that  nothing  in  the  world 
shall  ever  induce  him  to  write  such  a  stanza 
as:—- 


72  POETRY 

Never,   though   my   mortal   summers   through   such 

length  of  years  shall  come, 
As  the  many-wintered  crow  that  leads  the  clanging 

rookery  home — 

when  it  is  so  easy  to  rhyme  "  come "  with 
"  drum  "  or  "  rule  of  thumb."  "  All  the  Eng- 
lish poets,"  he  says,  "  have  used  such  rhymes 
under  compulsion  of  the  exigencies  of  form — 
perish  the  exigencies  of  form  !  " 

The  young  versifier  who  is  also  a  poet,  howso- 
ever ignorant  he  may  be  of  metrical  science, 
feels  that  the  harmonies  of  our  great  poets  are 
not  used  for  makeshift  purposes ;  that,  on  the 
contrary,  this  fluent  rhyming  gives  him,  the 
young  poet,  that  artistic  satisfaction  of  a  sense 
of  cadence  which  is  of  all  intellectual  delights 
the  greatest.  And  as  he  grows  older  and  bolder, 
and  comes  to  know  his  business  more  thoroughly, 
the  more  freely  does  he  rhyme  "  love  "  with 
"  move  "  and  "  grove,"  "  home  "  with  "  come," 
and  even  "  ever "  with  "  river."  He  per- 
ceives that,  owing  to  the  blending  of  conson- 
antal with  vowel  power,  such  fluent  rhymes 
as  these  are  not  only  as  good  as  hard 
rhymes,  but  in  many  cases  very  much  better, 
for  in  long  sequences  hard  rhyming,  though 
grateful  at  first,  may  begin  to  pall.  The  theory 
of  rhyming  cannot  be  entered  upon  here ;  but 
perhaps  what  Bacon  says  in  reference  to  another 
matter  is  applicable  to  fluent  rhyming  as  a 
change  from  hard  rhyming.  "  The  sliding," 
says  he,  "  in  the  close  or  cadence  hath  an  agree- 
ment with  the  figure  in  rhetorick  which  they  call 
prater  expectatum,  for  there  is  a  pleasure  in 


THE   POSITION   OF   POETRY        73 

being  deceived."  Indeed,  rhymes  like  "  come  " 
and  "  home "  are  sufficiently  near  to  hard 
rhymes  to  gratify  the  expectation  of  the  ear, 
and  yet  they  give  that  soupc.on  of  variety  and 
surprise  which  true  poets  and  true  readers  of 
poetry  love. 

So  much  for  poetry's  mere  place  among  the 
other  arts. 


IV 


I 


"^HERE  is  one  great  point  of  superiority 
that  musical  art  exhibits  over  met- 
rical art.  This  consists,  not  in  the 
capacity  for  melody,  but  in  the 
capacity  for  harmony  in  the  musician's  sense. 
The  finest  music  of  iEschylus,  of  Pindar,  of 
Shakespeare,  of  Milton,  is  after  all  only  a 
succession  of  melodious  notes,  and,  in  en- 
deavouring to  catch  the  harmonic  intent  of 
strophe,  antistrophe  and  epode  in  the  Greek 
chorus,  and  in  the  true  ode  (that  of  Pindar), 
we  can  only  succeed  by  pressing  memory  into 
our  service.  We  have  to  recall  by  memory  the 
waves  that  have  gone  before,  and  then  to 
imagine  their  harmonic  power  in  relation  to  the 
waves  at  present  occupying  the  ear.  Counter- 
point, therefore,  is  not  to  be  achieved  by  the 
metricist,  even  though  he  be  Pindar  himself ; 
but  in  music  this  perfect  ideal  harmony  was 
foreshadowed  perhaps  in  the  earliest  writing. 

74 


COMPARATIVE   VALUE  75 

We  know  at  least  that  as  early  as  the  twelfth 
century  counterpoint  began  to  show  a  vigorous 
life,  and  the  study  of  it  is  now  a  familiar  branch 
of  musical  science. 

Now,  inasmuch  as  "  Nature's  own  hymn  "  is 
and  must  be  the  harmonic  blending  of  appar- 
ently independent  and  apparently  discordant 
notes,  among  the  arts  whose  appeal  is  through 
the  ear  that  which  can  achieve  counterpoint 
must  perhaps  rank  as  a  pure  art  above  one 
which  cannot  achieve  it.  We  are,  of  course, 
speaking  here  of  metre  only.  We  have  not 
space  to  inquire  whether  the  counterpoint  of 
absolute  poetry  is  the  harmony  underlying 
apparently  discordant  emotions — the  emotion 
produced  by  a  word  being  more  persistent  than 
the  emotion  produced  by  an  inarticulate  sound. 

But  if  poetry  falls  behind  music  in  rhythmic 
scope  it  is  capable  of  rendering  emotion  after 
emotion  has  become  disintegrated  into  thoughts, 
and  here,  as  we  have  seen,  it  enters  into  direct 
competition  with  the  art  of  prose.  It  can  use 
the  emphasis  of  sound,  not  for  its  own  sake 
merely,  but  to  strengthen  the  emphasis  of  sense 
and  can  thus  give  a  fuller  and  more  adequate 
expression  to  the  soul  of  man  than  music  at  its 
highest  can  give.  With  regard  to  prose,  no 


76  POETRY 

doubt  such  writing  as  Plato's  description  of  the 
chariot  of  the  soul,  his  description  of  the  island 
of  Atlantis,  or  of  Er's  visit  to  the  place  of  de- 
parted souls,  comes  but  a  short  way  behind 
poetry  in  imaginative  and  even  in  rhythmic 
appeal.  It  is  impossible,  however,  here  to  do  more 
than  touch  upon  the  subject  of  the  rhythm  of 
prose  in  its  relation  to  the  rhythm  of  poetry  ; 
for  in  this  matter  the  genius  of  each  individual 
language  has  to  be  taken  into  account. 

Perhaps  it  may  be  said  that  deeper  than  all 
the  rhythms  of  art  is  that  rhythm  which  art 
would  fain  catch,  the  rhythm  of  nature  ;  for 
the  rhythm  of  nature  is  the  rhythm  of  life 
itself.  This  rhythm  can  be  caught  by  prose  as 
well  as  by  poetry,  such  prose,  for  instance,  as 
that  of  the  English  Bible.  Certainly  the  rhythm 
of  verse  at  its  highest,  such,  for  instance,  as  that 
of  Shakespeare's  greatest  writings,  is  nothing 
more  and  nothing  less  than  the  metre  of  that 
energy  of  the  spirit  which  surges  within  the 
bosom  of  him  who  speaks,  whether  he  speak  in 
verse  or  in  impassioned  prose.  Being  rhythm, 
it  is  of  course  governed  by  law,  but  it  is  a  law 
which  transcends  in  subtlety  the  conscious  art 
of  the  metricist,  and  is  only  caught  by  the  poet 
in  his  most  inspired  moods,  a  law,  which,  being 


COMPARATIVE   VALUE  77 

part  of  nature's  own  sanctions,  can  of  course 
never  be  formulated  but  only  expressed,  as  it 
is  expressed  in  the  melody  of  the  bird,  in  the 
inscrutable  harmony  of  the  entire  bird  chorus 
of  a  thicket,  in  the  whisper  of  the  leaves  of  the 
tree,  and  in  the  song  or  wail  of  wind  and  sea. 

Now  is  not  this  rhythm  of  nature  represented 
by  that  "  sense  rhythm  "  which  prose  can  catch 
as  well  as  poetry,  that  sense  rhythm  whose 
finest  expressions  are  to  be  found  in  the  Bible, 
Hebrew  and  English,  and  in  the  Biblical  move- 
ments of  the  English  Prayer  Book,  and  in  the 
dramatic  prose  of  Shakespeare  at  its  best  ? 
Whether  it  is  caught  by  prose  or  by  verse, 
one  of  the  virtues  of  the  rhythm  of  nature  is 
that  it  is  translatable.  Hamlet's  peroration 
about  man  and  Raleigh's  apostrophe  to  death 
are  as  translatable  into  other  languages  as  are 
the  Hebrew  psalms,  or  as  is  Manu's  magnificent 
passage  about  the  singleness  of  man  : — 

"  Single  is  each  man  born  into  the  world ; 
single  he  dies ;  single  he  receives  the  reward 
of  his  good  deeds,  and  single  the  punishment  of 
his  evil  deeds.  When  he  dies  his  body  lies  like 
a  fallen  tree  upon  the  earth,  but  his  virtue 
accompanies  his  soul.  Wherefore  let  man 
harvest  and  garner  virtue,  so  that  he  may  have 


78  POETRY 

an  inseparable  companion  in  traversing  that 
gloom  which  is  so  hard  to  be  traversed." 

Here  the  "  rhythm,"  being  the  inevitable 
movement  of  emotion  and  "  sense,"  can  be 
caught  and  translated  by  every  literature  under 
the  sun.  While,  however,  the  great  goal  before 
the  poet  is  to  compel  the  listener  to  expect  his 
caesuric  effects,  the  great  goal  before  the  writer 
of  poetic  prose  is  in  the  very  opposite  direction  ; 
it  is  to  make  use  of  the  concrete  figures  and 
impassioned  diction  of  the  poet,  but  at  the  same 
time  to  avoid  the  recognized  and  expected 
metrical  bars  upon  which  the  poet  depends. 
The  moment  the  prose  poet  passes  from  the 
rhythm  of  prose  to  the  ryhthm  of  metre  the 
apparent  sincerity  of  his  writing  is  destroyed. 

As  compared  with  sculpture  and  painting  the 
great  infirmity  of  poetry,  as  an  "  imitation  "  of 
nature,  is  of  course  that  the  medium  is  always 
and  of  necessity  words — even  when  no  words 
could,  in  the  dramatic  situation,  have  been 
spoken.  It  is  not  only  Homer  who  is  obliged 
sometimes  to  forget  that  passion  when  at  white 
heat  is  never  voluble,  is  scarcely  even  articulate, 
the  dramatists  also  are  obliged  to  forget  that 
in  love  and  in  hate,  at  their  tensest,  words  seem 
weak  and  foolish  when  compared  with  the  silent 


COMPARATIVE   VALUE  79 

and  satisfying  triumph  and  glory  of  deeds,  such 
as  the  plastic  arts  can  render.  This  becomes 
manifest  enough  when  we  compare  the  Niobe 
group  or  the  Laocoon  group,  or  the  great 
dramatic  paintings  of  the  modern  world,  with 
even  the  finest  efforts  of  dramatic  poetry,  such 
as  the  speech  of  Andromache  to  Hector,  or  the 
speech  of  Priam  to  Achilles,  nay  such  as  even 
the  cries  of  Cassandra  in  the  Agamemnon,  or 
the  wailings  of  Lear  over  the  dead  Cordelia. 

Even  when  writing  the  words  uttered  by 
(Edipus  as  the  terrible  truth  breaks  in  upon  his 
soul,  Sophocles  must  have  felt  that,  in  the 
holiest  chambers  of  sorrow,  and  in  the  highest 
agonies  of  suffering  reigns  that  awful  silence 
which  not  poetry,  but  painting  sometimes,  and 
sculpture  always,  can  render.  What  human 
sounds  could  render  the  agony  of  Niobe,  or  the 
agony  of  Laocoon,  as  we  see  them  in  the  sculp- 
tor's rendering  ?  Not  articulate  speech  at  all  ; 
not  words,  but  wails. 

It  is  the  same  with  hate  ;  it  is  the  same  with 
love.  We  are  not  speaking  merely  of  the  un- 
packing of  the  heart  in  which  the  angry  warriors 
of  the  Iliad  indulge.  Even  such  subtle  writing 
as  that  of  ^Eschylus  and  Sophocles  falls  below 
the  work  of  the  painter.  Hate,  though  voluble 


80  POETRY 

perhaps,  as  Clytaemnestra's  when  hate  is  at  that 
red-heat  glow  which  the  poet  can  render, 
changes  in  a  moment  whenever  that  redness 
has  been  fanned  to  hatred's  own  last  complexion 
— whiteness  as  of  iron  at  the  melting-point — 
when  the  heart  has  grown  far  too  big  to  be 
"  unpacked  "  at  all,  and  even  the  bitter  epigrams 
of  hate's  own  rhetoric,  though  brief  as  the 
terrier's  snap  before  he  fleshes  his  teeth,  or  as 
the  short  snarl  of  the  tigress  as  she  springs 
before  her  cubs  in  danger,  are  all  too  slow  and 
sluggish  for  a  soul  to  which  language  at  its 
tensest  has  become  idle  play.  But  this  is  just 
what  cannot  be  rendered  by  an  art  whose 
medium  consists  solely  of  words. 

It  is  in  giving  voice,  not  to  emotion  at  its 
tensest,  but  to  the  vibrations  of  emotion,  it  is 
in  expressing  the  countless  shifting  movements 
of  the  soul  from  passion  to  passion,  that  poetry 
shows  in  spite  of  all  her  infirmities  her  superiority 
to  the  plastic  arts.  Hamlet  and  the  Agamemnon, 
the  Iliad,  and  the  (Edipus  Tyrannus,  are 
adequate  to  the  entire  breadth  and  depth  of 
man's  soul. 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC  ART 

WE  have  now  reached  our  last  general 
inquiry — What  varieties  of  poetic 
art  are  the  outcome  of  the  two 
kinds  of  poetic  impulse,  dramatic 
imagination  and  lyric  or  egoistic  imagination  ? 
It  would,  of  course,  be  impossible  here  to 
examine  fully  the  sub]ect  of  poetic  imagination. 
For  in  order  to  do  so  we  should  have  to  enter 
upon  the  vast  question  of  the  effect  of  artistic 
environment  upon  the  development  of  man's 
poetic  imagination  ;  we  should  have  to  inquire 
how  the  instinctive  methods  of  each  poet,  and 
of  each  group  of  poets  have  been  modified  and 
often  governed  by  the  methods  characteristic 
of  their  own  time  and  country.  We  should  have 
to  inquire,  for  instance,  how  far  such  landscape 
as  that  of  Sophocles  in  the  (Edipus  Coloneus 
and  such  landscape  as  that  of  Wordsworth, 
depends  upon  difference  of  individual  tempera- 
ment, and  how  far  upon  difference  of  artistic 

81  G 


82  POETRY 

environment.  That,  in  any  thorough  and 
exhaustive  discussion  of  poetic  imagination,  the 
question  of  artistic  environment  must  be  taken 
into  account,  the  case  of  the  Iliad  is  alone 
sufficient  to  show.  Ages  before  Phrynichus, 
ages  before  an  acted  drama  was  dreamed  of, 
a  dramatic  poet  of  the  first  order  arose,  and, 
though  he  was  obliged  to  express  his  splendid 
dramatic  imagination  through  epic  forms,  he 
expressed  it  almost  as  fully  as  if  he  had  inherited 
the  method  and  the  stage  of  Sophocles.  And  if 
Homer  never  lived  at  all,  then  an  entire  group 
of  dramatic  poets  arose  in  remote  times,  whose 
method  was  epic  instead  of  dramatic  simply 
because  there  was  then  no  stage. 

This,  contrasted  with  the  fact  that  in  a  single 
half -century  the  tragic  art  of  Greece  arose  with 
^Eschylus,  culminated  with  Sophocles,  and  de- 
cayed with  Euripides,  and  contrasted  also  with 
the  fact  that  in  England  at  one  time,  and  in 
Spain  at  one  time,  almost  the  entire  poetic 
imagination  of  the  country  found  expression  in 
the  acted  drama  alone,  is  sufficient  to  show 
that  a  poet's  artistic  methods  are  very  largely 
influenced  by  the  artistic  environments  of  his 
country  and  time.  So  vast  a  subject  as  this, 
however,  is  beyond  our  scope,  and  we  can  only 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART       83 

point  to  the  familiar  instance  of  the  troubadours 
and  the  trouve~res  and  then  pass  on. 

With  the  trouve"re  (the  poet  of  the  langue 
d'oil),  the  story  or  situation  is  always  the  end 
of  which  the  musical  language  is  the  means  ; 
with  the  troubadour  (the  poet  of  the  langue 
d'oc),  the  form  is  so  beloved,  the  musical 
language  so  enthralling,  that,  however  beautiful 
may  be  the  story  or  situation,  it  is  felt  to  be 
no  more  than  the  means  to  a  more  beloved  and 
beautiful  end.  But  then  nature  makes  her  own 
troubadours,  and  her  own  trouve"res  irrespective 
of  fashion  and  of  time — irrespective  of  langue 
d'oc  and  langue  d'oil.  In  comparing  the  trouba- 
dours with  the  trouve"res,  this  is  what  strikes 
us  at  once — there  are  certain  troubadours  who 
by  temperament,  by  original  endowment  of 
nature,  ought  to  have  been  trouve"res,  and  there 
are  certain  trouve"res  who  by  temperament 
ought  to  have  been  troubadours.  Surrounding 
conditions  alone  have  made  them  what  they 
are.  There  are  those  whose  impulse  (though 
writing  in  obedience  to  contemporary  fashions 
lyrics  in  the  langue  d'oc)  is  manifestly  to 
narrate,  and  there  are  those  whose  impulse 
(though  writing  in  obedience  to  contemporary 
fashions  fabliaux  in  the  langue  d'oil)  is  simply 
to  sing. 


84  POETRY 

In  other  words,  there  are  those  who,  though 
writing  after  the  fashion  of  their  brother- 
troubadours,  are  more  impressed  with  the 
romance  and  wonderfulness  of  the  human  life 
outside  them  than  with  the  romance  and  won- 
derfulness of  their  own  passions,  and  who 
delight  in  depicting  the  external  world  in  any 
form  that  may  be  the  popular  form  of  their 
time  ;  and  there  are  those  who,  though  writing 
after  the  fashion  of  their  brother-trouveres,  are 
far  more  occupied  with  the  life  within  them 
than  with  that  outer  life  which  the  taste  of 
their  time  and  country  calls  upon  them  to 
paint — born  rhythmists  who  must  sing,  who 
translate  everything  external  as  well  as  internal 
into  verbal  melody.  Of  the  former  class  Pierre 
Vidal,  of  the  latter  class  the  author  of  "  Le  Lay 
de  1'Oiselet,"  may  be  taken  as  the  respective 
types. 

That  the  same  forces  are  seen  at  work  in  all 
literatures  few  students  of  poetry  will  deny,— 
though  in  some  poetical  groups  these  forces 
are  no  doubt  more  potent  than  in  others,  as, 
for  instance,  with  the  great  parable  poets  of 
Persia,  in  some  of  whom  there  is  perpetually 
apparent  a  conflict  between  the  dominance  of 
the  Oriental  taste  for  allegory  and  subtle  sug- 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART        85 

gestion,  as  expressed  in  the  Zoroastrian  definition 
of  poetry, — "  apparent  pictures  of  unapparent 
realities," — and  the  opposite  yearning  to  repre- 
sent human  life  with  the  freshness  and  natural 
freedom  characteristic  of  Western  poetry. 

Allowing,  however,  for  all  the  potency  of 
external  influences,  we  shall  not  be  wrong  in 
saying  that  of  poetic  imagination  there  are  two 
distinct  kinds. 

(1)  the  kind  of  poetic  imagination  seen  at  its 
highest  in  ^schylus,   Sophocles,   Shakespeare, 
and  Homer,  and 

(2)  the  kind  of  poetic  imagination  seen  at  its 
highest  in  Pindar,  Dante,  and  Milton,  or  else  in 
Sappho,  Heine,  and  Shelley. 

The  former,  being  in  its  highest  dramatic 
exercise  unconditioned  by  the  personal  or  lyrical 
impulse  of  the  poet,  might  perhaps  be  called 
absolute  dramatic  vision  ;  the  latter,  being  more 
or  less  conditioned  by  the  personal  or  lyrical 
impulse  of  the  poet,  might  be  called  relative 
dramatic  vision.  It  seems  impossible  to  classify 
poets,  or  to  classify  the  different  varieties 
of  poetry,  without  drawing  some  such  distinc- 
tion as  this,  whatever  words  of  definition  we 
may  choose  to  adopt. 

For  the  achievement  of  all  pure  lyric  poetry, 


86  POETRY 

such  as  the  ode,  the  song,  the  elegy,  the  idyl, 
the  sonnet,  the  stornello,  it  is  evident  that  the 
imaginative  force  we  have  called  relative  vision 
will  suffice.  And  if  we  consider  the  matter 
thoroughly,  in  many  other  forms  of  poetic 
art — forms  which  at  first  sight  might  seem  to 
require  absolute  vision — we  shall  find  nothing 
but  relative  vision  at  work. 

Even  in  Dante,  and  even  in  Milton  and  Virgil, 
it  might  be  difficult  to  trace  the  working  of  any 
other  than  relative  vision.  And  as  to  the 
entire  body  of  Asiatic  poets  it  might  perhaps 
be  found  (even  in  view  of  the  Indian  drama) 
that  relative  vision  suffices  to  do  all  their  work. 
Indeed  the  temper  which  produces  true  drama 
is,  it  might  almost  be  said,  a  growth  of  the 
Western  mind.  For,  unless  it  be  Semitic  as 
seen  in  the  dramatic  narratives  of  the  Bible, 
or  Chinese  as  seen  in  that  remarkable  prose 
story,  "  The  Two  Fair  Cousins,"  translated  by 
Remusat,  absolute  vision  seems  to  have  but 
small  place  in  the  literatures  of  Asia. 

The  wonderfulness  of  the  world  and  the 
romantic  possibilities  of  fate,  or  circumstance, 
or  chance — not  the  wonderfulness  of  the  char- 
acter to  whom  these  possibilities  befall — are 
ever  present  to  the  mind  of  the  Asiatic  poet. 


VARIETIES  OF  POETIC  ART        87 

Even  in  so  late  a  writer  as  the  poet  of  the  Shah 
Nameh,  the  hero  Irij,  the  hero  Zal,  and  the  hero 
Zohreb,  are  in  character  the  same  person,  the 
virtuous  young  man  who  combines  the  courage 
of  youth  with  the  wisdom  and  forbearance  of 
age.  And,  as  regards  the  earlier  poets  of  Asia, 
it  was  not  till  the  shadowy  demigods  and  heroes 
of  the  Asiatic  races  crossed  the  Caucasus,  and 
breathed  a  more  bracing  air,  that  they  became 
really  individual  characters. 

But  among  the  many  qualities  of  man's  mind 
that  were  invigorated  and  rejuvenated  by  that 
great  exodus  from  the  dreamy  plains  of  Asia 
is  to  be  counted,  above  all  others,  his  poetic 
imagination.  The  mere  sense  of  wonder,  which 
had  formerly  been  an  all-sufficing  source  of 
pleasure  to  him,  was  all-sufficing  no  longer. 
The  wonderful  adventure  must  now  be  con- 
nected with  a  real  and  interesting  individual 
character.  It  was  left  for  the  poets  of  Europe 
to  show  that,  given  the  interesting  character, 
given  the  Achilles,  the  Odysseus,  the  Helen, 
the  Priam,  any  adventure  happening  to  such  a 
character  becomes  interesting. 

What  then  is  this  absolute  vision,  this  true 
dramatic  imagination  which  can  hardly  be 
found  in  Asia — which  even  in  Europe  cannot 
be  found  except  in  rare  cases  ? 


88  POERTY 

Between  relative  and  absolute  vision  the 
difference  seems  to  be  this,  that  the  former 
only  enables  the  poet,  even  in  its  very  highest 
exercise,  to  make  his  own  individuality,  or 
else  humanity  as  represented  by  his  own  in- 
dividuality, live  in  the  imagined  situation ; 
the  latter  enables  him  in  its  highest  exercise  to 
make  special  individual  characters  other  than 
the  poet's  own,  live  in  the  imagined  situation. 

"  That  which  exists  in  nature,"  says  Hegel, 
"  is  a  something  purely  individual  and  parti- 
cular. Art  on  the  contrary  is  essentially  des- 
tined to  manifest  the  general."  And  no  doubt 
this  is  true  as  regards  the  plastic  arts,  and  true 
also  as  regards  literary  art,  save  in  the  very 
highest  reaches  of  pure  drama  and  pure  lyric, 
when  it  seems  to  become  art  no  longer — when 
it  seems  to  become  the  very  voice  of  Nature 
herself.  The  cry  of  Priam  when  he  puts  to 
his  lips  the  hand  that  slew  his  son  is  not  merely 
the  cry  of  a  bereaved  and  aged  parent ;  it  is 
the  cry  of  the  individual  King  of  Troy,  and  ex- 
presses above  everything  else  that  most  naif, 
pathetic  and  winsome  character.  Put  the  words 
into  the  mouth  of  an  irascible  and  passionate 
Lear  and  they  would  be  entirely  out  of  keeping. 

It  may  be  said  then  that,  while  the  poet  of 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC  ART       89 

relative  vision,  even  in  its  very  highest  exercise, 
can  only,  when  depicting  the  external  world, 
deal  with  the  general,  the  poet  of  absolute 
vision  can  compete  with  Nature  herself,  and 
deal  with  both  general  and  particular.  If  this 
is  really  so  we  may  perhaps  find  a  basis  for  a 
classification  of  poetry  and  poets.  That  all 
poets  must  be  singers  has  already  been  main- 
tained. But  singers  seem  to  be  divisible  into 
three  classes  : — First,  the  pure  lyrists,  each  of 
whom  can  with  his  one  voice  sing  only  one  tune  ; 
secondly,  the  epic  poets,  save  Homer,  the  bulk 
of  the  narrative  poets,  and  the  quasi-dramatists, 
each  of  whom  can  with  his  one  voice  sing  several 
tunes ;  and,  thirdly,  the  true  dramatists,  who, 
having,  like  the  nightingale  of  Gongora,  many 
tongues,  can  sing  all  tunes. 

It  is  to  the  first-named  of  these  classes  that 
most  poets  belong.  With  regard  to  the  second- 
class,  there  are  not  of  course  many  poets  left 
for  it ;  the  first  absorbs  so  many.  But,  when 
we  come  to  consider  that  among  those  who, 
with  each  his  one  voice,  can  sing  many  tunes, 
are  Pindar,  Firdausi,  Jami,  Virgil,  Dante,  Mil  ton, 
Spenser,  Goethe,  Byron,  Coleridge,  Shelley, 
Keats,  Schiller,  Victor  Hugo,  the  second-class 
is  so  various  that  no  generalization  save  such  a 


go  POETRY 

broad  one  as  ours  could  embrace  its  members. 
And  now  we  come  to  class  three,  and  must 
pause.  The  third  class  is  necessarily  very 
small.  In  it  can  only  be  placed  such  names  as 
Shakespeare,  ^Eschylus,  Sophocles,  Homer,  and 
(hardly)  Chaucer. 

These  three  kinds  of  poets  represent  three 
totally  different  kinds  of  poetic  activity. 

With  regard  to  the  first,  the  pure  lyrists,  the 
impulse  is  pure  egoism.  Many  of  them  have 
less  of  even  relative  vision  at  its  highest  than 
the  mass  of  mankind.  They  are  often  too  much 
engaged  with  the  emotions  within  to  have  any 
deep  sympathy  with  the  life  around  them.  Of 
every  poet  of  this  class  it  may  be  said  that  his 
mind  to  him  "  a  kingdom  is,"  and  that  the 
smaller  the  poet  the  bigger  to  him  is  that 
kingdom.  To  make  use  of  a  homely  image — 
like  the  chaffinch  whose  eyes  have  been  pricked 
by  the  bird-fancier,  the  pure  lyrist  is  sometimes 
a  warbler  because  he  is  blind.  Still  he  feels 
that  the  Muse  loves  him  exceedingly.  She  takes 
away  his  eyesight,  but  she  gives  him  sweet  song. 
And  his  song  is  very  sweet,  very  sad,  and  very 
beautiful ;  but  it  is  all  about  the  world  within 
his  own  soul — its  sorrows,  joys,  fears,  and 
aspirations. 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART        91 

With  regard  to  the  second  class  the  impulse 
here  is  no  doubt  a  kind  of  egoism  too,  yet  the 
poets  of  this  class  are  all  of  a  different  temper 
from  the  pure  lyrists.  They  have  a  wide  im- 
agination, but  it  is  still  relative,  still  egoistic. 
They  have  splendid  eyes,  but  eyes  that  never 
get  beyond  seeing  general,  universal  humanity 
(typified  by  themselves)  in  the  imagined  situa- 
tion. Not  even  to  these  is  it  given  to  break 
through  that  law  of  centrality  by  which  every 
"  me  "  feels  itself  to  be  the  central  "  me." — the 
only  "  me  "  of  the  universe,  round  which  all 
other  spurious  "  me's  "  revolve.  This  "  me  "  of 
theirs  they  can  transmute  into  many  shapes, 
but  they  cannot  create  other  "  me's," — nay, 
for  egoism,  some  of  them  scarcely  would  perhaps 
if  they  could. 

The  third  class,  the  true  dramatists,  whose 
impulse  is  the  simple  yearning  to  create  akin 
to  that  which  made  "  the  great  Vishnu  yearn 
to  create  a  world,"  are  "  of  imagination  all 
compact " — so  much  so  that  when  at  work 
"  the  divinity "  which  lamblichus  speaks  of 
"  seizes  for  the  time  the  soul,  and  guides  it  as 
he  will." 

The  distinction  between  the  pure  lyrists  and 
the  other  two  classes  of  poets  is  obvious  enough. 


92  POETRY 

But  the  distinction  between  the  quasi-drama- 
tists  and  the  pure  dramatists  requires  a  word 
of  explanation  before  we  proceed  to  touch  upon 
the  various  kinds  of  poetry  that  spring  from  the 
exercise  of  relative  and  absolute  vision.  Some- 
times, to  be  sure,  the  vision  of  the  true  drama- 
tists— the  greatest  dramatists — will  suddenly 
become  narrowed  and  obscured,  as  in  that  part 
of  the  (Edipus  Tyrannus  where  Sophocles  makes 
GBdipus  ignorant  of  what  every  one  in  Thebes 
must  have  known,  the  murder  of  Laius.  And, 
again,  finely  as  Sophocles  has  conceived  the 
character  of  Electra,  he  makes  her,  in  her 
dispute  with  Chrysothemis,  give  expression  to 
sentiments  that,  in  another  play  of  his  own, 
come  far  more  appropriately  from  the  lofty 
character  of  Antigone  in  a  parallel  dispute  with 
Ismene.  And,  on  the  other  hand,  examples  of 
relative  vision,  in  its  furthest  reaches,  can  be 
found  in  abundance  everywhere,  especially  in 
Virgil,  Dante,  Calderon,  and  Milton.  Some  of 
the  most  remarkable  examples  of  that  high 
kind  of  relative  vision  which  may  easily  be 
mistaken  for  absolute  vision  may  be  found  in 
those  great  prose  epics  of  the  North,  which 
Aristotle  would  have  called  poems.  Here  is 
one  from  the  Volsunga  Saga.  While  the  brothers 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC  ART       93 

of  Gudrun  are  about  their  treacherous  business 
of  murdering  Sigurd,  her  husband,  as  he  lies 
asleep  in  her  arms,  Brynhild,  Sigurd's  former 
love,  who  in  the  frenzy  of  "  love  turned  to  hate  " 
has  instigated  the  murderers  to  the  deed,  hovers 
outside  the  chamber  with  Gunnar,  her  husband, 
and  listens  to  the  wail  of  her  rival  who  is 
weltering  in  Sigurd's  blood.  At  the  sound  of 
that  wail  Brynhild  laughs. 

"  Then  said  Gunnar  to  her  :  Thou  laughest  not  because 
thy  heart  roots  are  gladded,  or  else  why  doth  thy  visage 
wax  so  wan  ?  "  * 

This  is,  of  course,  very  fine ;  but,  as  any  two 
characters  in  that  dramatic  situation  might  have 
done  that  dramatic  business,  fine  as  it  is — as 
the  sagaman  gives  us  the  general  and  not  the 
particular, — the  vision  at  work  is  not  absolute 
but  relative  at  its  very  highest  exercise.  But 
our  examples  will  be  more  interesting  if  taken 
from  English  poets.  In  Coleridge's  "  Ancient 
Mariner "  we  find  an  immense  amount  of 
relative  vision  of  so  high  a  kind  that  at  first 
it  seems  absolute  vision.  When  the  ancient 
mariner,  in  his  narrative  to  the  wedding  guest, 
reaches  the  slaying  of  the  albatross,  he  stops, 

Translation  of  Morris  and  Magnusson 


94  POETRY 

he  can  proceed  no  further,  and  the  wedding 
guest  exclaims  : — 

"  God  save  thee,  Ancient  Mariner, 

From  the  fiends  that  plague  thee  thus  I 
Why  look'st  thou  so  ?  "     "  With  my  cross-bow 
I  shot  the  albatross." 

But  there  are  instances  of  relative  vision — 
especially  in  the  great  master  of  absolute  vision, 
Shakespeare — which  are  higher  still, — so  high 
indeed  that  not  to  relegate  them  to  absolute 
vision  seems  at  first  sight  pedantic.  Such  an 
example  is  the  famous  speech  of  Lady  Macbeth 
in  the  second  act,  where  she  says  : — 

"  Had  he  not  resembled 
My  father  as  he  slept,  I  had  done't." 

Marvellously  subtle  as  is  this  speech,  it  will 
be  found,  if  analysed,  that  it  expresses  the 
general  human  soul  rather  than  any  one  special 
human  soul.  Indeed,  Leigh  Hunt  records  the 
case  of  a  bargeman  who,  charged  with  robbing 
a  sleeping  traveller  in  his  barge,  used  in  his 
confession  almost  identical  words — "  Had  he 
not  looked  like  my  father  as  he  slept,  I  should 
have  killed  as  well  as  robbed  him."  Again,  the 
thousand  and  one  cases  (to  be  found  in  every 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART       95 

literature)  where  a  character,  overwhelmed  by 
some  sudden  surprise  or  terror,  asks  whether 
the  action  going  on  is  that  of  a  dream  or  of  real 
life,  must  all,  on  severe  analysis,  be  classed 
under  relative  rather  than  under  absolute  vision, 
— even  such  a  fine  speech,  for  instance,  as  that 
where  Pericles,  on  discovering  Marina,  exclaims  : 

"  This  is  the  rarest  dream  that  e'er  dull  sleep 
Did  mock  sad  fools  withal." 

or  as  that  in  the  third  act  of  Titus  Andronicus, 
where  Titus,  beholding  his  mutilated  and  ruined 
daughter,  asks — 

"  When  will  this  fearful  slumber  have  an  end  ?  " 

Even  here,  we  say,  the  humanity  rendered 
is  general  and  not  particular,  the  vision  at  work 
is  relative  and  not  absolute.  The  poet,  as 
representing  the  whole  human  race,  throwing 
himself  into  the  imagined  situation,  gives  us 
what  general  humanity  would  have  thought, 
felt,  said  or  done  in  that  situation,  not  what  one 
particular  individual  and  he  alone  would  have 
thought,  felt,  said,  or  done. 

Now  what  we  have  called  absolute  vision 
operates  in  a  very  different  way.  So  vividly 
is  the  poet's  mere  creative  instinct  at  work 


96  POETRY 

that  the  ego  sinks  into  passivity — becomes 
insensitive  to  all  impressions  other  than  those 
dictated  by  the  vision — by  the  "  divinity " 
which  has  "  seized  the  soul." 

Shakespeare  is  full  of  examples.  Take  the 
scene  in  the  first  act  of  Hamlet,  where  Hamlet 
hears  for  the  first  time,  from  Horatio,  that  his 
father's  ghost  haunts  the  castle.  Having  by 
short  sharp  questions  elicited  the  salient  facts 
attending  the  apparition,  Hamlet  says,  "  I 
would  I  had  been  there."  To  this  Horatio 
makes  the  very  commonplace  reply,  "  It  would 
have  much  amazed  you."  Note  the  mar- 
vellously dramatic  reply  of  Hamlet — "  Very 
like,  very  like  !  stayed  it  long  ?  "  Suppose  that 
this  dialogue  had  been  attempted  by  any  other 
poet  than  a  true  dramatist,  or  by  a  true  drama- 
tist in  any  other  mood  than  his  very  highest, 
Hamlet,  on  hearing  Horatio's  commonplace 
remarks  upon  phenomena,  which  to  Hamlet 
were  more  subversive  of  the  very  order  of  the 
universe  than  if  a  dozen  stars  had  fallen  from 
their  courses,  would  have  burst  out  with — 
"  Amazed  me !  "  and  then  would  have  followed 
an  eloquent  declamation  about  the  "  amazing  " 
nature  of  the  phenomena  and  their  effect  upon 
him,  But  so  entirely  has  the  poet  become 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART       97 

Hamlet,  so  completely  has  "  the  divinity  seized 
his  soul,"  that  all  language  seems  equally  weak 
for  expressing  the  turbulence  within  the  soul  of 
the  character,  and  Hamlet  exclaims  in  a  sort  of 
meditative  irony,  "  Very  like,  very  like  1  "  It 
is  exactly  this  one  man  Hamlet,  and  no  other 
man,  who  in  this  situation  would  have  so 
expressed  himself. 

Charles  Knight  has  some  pertinent  remarks 
upon  this  speech  of  Hamlet ;  yet  he  misses 
its  true  value  and  treats  it  from  the  general 
rather  than  from  the  particular  side.  Instances 
of  absolute  vision  in  Shakespeare  crowd  upon 
us ;  but  we  can  find  room  for  only  one  other. 
In  the  pathetic  speech  of  Othello,  just  before 
he  kills  himself,  he  declares  himself  to  be  : 

"  One  not  easily  Jealous,  but,  being  wrought, 
Perplexed  in  the  extreme." 

Consider  the  marvellous  timbre  of  the  word 
"  wrought "  as  coming  from  a  character  like 
Othello.  When  writing  this  passage,  especially 
when  writing  this  word,  the  poet  had  become 
entirely  the  simple  English  soldier-hero,  as  the 
Moor  really  is — he  had  become  Othello,  look- 
ing upon  himself  as  "  not  easily  jealous," 
whereas  he  was  "  wrought "  and  "  perplexed 

H 


98  POETRY 

in  the  extreme  "  by  tricks  which  Hamlet  would 
have  seen  through  in  a  moment. 

Victor  Hugo  furnishes  two  striking  examples 
of  what  we  mean  by  lyric  imagination  and 
dramatic  imagination.  In  the  one  he  makes 
pure  fancy  do  the  work  of  dramatic  imagination. 
We  allude  to  the  passage  in  the  second  series 
of  "  La  L£gende  des  Siecles,"  where  he  calls 
up  the  picture  of  the  crescent  moon  hanging 
over  the  lonely  sea  : 

"  Ce  fer  d'or  qu'a  laisse"  tomber  dans  les  nue"es 
Le  sombre  cheval  de  la  nuit  ?  " 

The  other  occurs  in  the  first  series  where, 
watching  Boaz  asleep,  and  looking  across  him 
over  the  harvest-field,  Ruth,  on  seeing  the 
crescent  moon  bent  among  the  stars,  asks  her- 
self: 

"  Quel  dieu,   quel  moissonneur  de  Internal  e'te' 

Avait,  en  s'en  allant,  n^gligemment  jete\ 
Cette  faucelle  d'or  dans  le  champ  des  6toiles  ? 

It  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  finer  example  of 
dramatic  imagination  than  this.  The  poet  has 
entered  the  soul  of  Ruth. 

While  all  other  forms  of  poetic  art  can  be 
vitalized  by  relative  vision,  there  are  two  forms 
(and  these  the  greatest)  in  which  absolute  vision 
is  demanded,  viz.,  the  drama,  and  in  a  lesser 
degree  the  Greek  epic,  especially  the  Iliad. 
This  will  be  seen  more  plainly  perhaps  if  we 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART        99 

now  vary  our  definitions  and  call  relative 
vision  egoistic  imagination,  absolute  vision 
dramatic  imagination. 

It  is  not  within  the  scope  of  this  work  to  dis- 
cuss in  detail  the  vast  subject  of  drama,  which 
would  require  a  book  by  itself  ;  but  inferentially 
we  have  been  able  to  say  much  that  will  convey 
our  generalizations  upon  the  subject. 

Much  of  the  dramatist's  work  can  be,  and  in 
fact  is,  effected  by  egoistic  imagination,  while  true 
dramatic  imagination  is  only  called  into  play  on 
comparatively  rare  occasions.  Not  only  fine 
but  sublime  dramatic  poems  have  been  written, 
however,  where  the  vitalizing  power  has  been 
entirely  that  of  lyrical  imagination.  We  need 
only  instance  the  Prometheus  Bound  of 
^Eschylus,  the  most  sublime  poem  in  the  world. 
The  dramas  of  Shelley  too,  like  those  of  Victor 
Hugo  and  Calderon,  are  informed  entirely  by 
egoistic  imagination.  In  all  these  splendid 
poems  the  dramatist  places  himself  in  the  imag- 
ined situation,  or  at  most  he  places  there  some 
typical  conception  of  universal  humanity. 

There  is  not  in  all  Calderon  any  such  display 
of  dramatic  imagination  as  we  get  in  that  won- 
derful speech  of  Priam's  in  the  last  book  of 
the  Iliad  to  which  we  have  before  alluded. 


ioo  POETRY 

There  is  not  in  the  Cenci  such  a  display  of 
dramatic  imagination  as  we  get  in  the  sudden 
burst  of  anger  from  the  spoilt  child  of  gods  and 
men,  Achilles  (anger  which  alarms  the  hero 
himself  as  much  as  it  alarms  Priam),  when  the 
prattle  of  the  old  man  has  carried  him  too  far. 
It  may  seem  bold  to  say  that  the  drama  of 
Goethe  is  informed  by  egoistic  imagination 
only — assuredly  the  prison-scene  in  Faust  is 
unsurpassed  in  the  literatures  of  the  world. 
Yet,  perhaps,  it  could  be  shown  of  the  passion 
and  the  pathos  of  Gretchen  throughout  the 
entire  play  that  it  betrays  a  female  character 
general  and  typical  rather  than  individual 
and  particular. 

The  nature  of  this  absolute  vision  or  true 
dramatic  imagination  is  easily  seen  if  we  com- 
pare the  dramatic  work  of  writers  without 
absolute  vision,  such  as  Calderon,  Goethe,  Ben 
Jonson,  Fletcher,  and  others,  with  the  dramatic 
work  of  jEschylus  and  of  Shakespeare.  While 
of  the  former  group  it  may  be  said  that  each 
poet  skilfully  works  his  imagination,  of  ^Eschy- 
lus  and  Shakespeare  it  must  be  said  that  each 
in  his  highest  dramatic  mood  does  not  work, 
but  is  worked  by  his  imagination.  Note,  for 
instance,  how  the  character  of  Clytaemnestra 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      101 

grows^and  glows  under  the  hand  of  ^Eschylus. 

The  poet  of  the  Odyssey  had  distinctly  saM 
that  ^Egisthus,  her  paramour,  had  struck  the 
blow,  but  the  dramatist,  having  imagined  the 
greatest  tragic  female  in  all  poetry,  finds  it 
impossible  to  let  a  man  like  ^Egisthus  assist 
such  a  woman  in  a  homicide  so  daring  and  so 
momentous.  And  when  in  that  terrible  speech 
of  hers  she  justifies  her  crime  (ostensibly  to  the 
outer  world,  but  really  to  her  own  conscience) 
the  way  in  which,  by  the  sheer  magnetism  of 
irresistible  personality,  she  draws  our  sympathy 
to  herself,  and  her  crime  is  unrivalled  out  of 
Shakespeare  and  not  surpassed  even  there. 
In  the  Great  Drama,  in  the  Agamemnon,  in 
Othello,  in  Hamlet,  in  Macbeth,  there  is  an 
imagination  at  work  whose  laws  are  inexorable, 
are  inevitable,  as  the  laws  by  the  operation  of 
which  the  planets  move  around  the  sun. 

Considering  how  large  and  on  the  whole  how 
good  is  the  body  of  modern  criticism  upon  drama, 
it  is  surprising  how  poor  is  the  modern  criticism 
upon  epic.  Aristotle,  comparing  tragedy  with 
epic,  gives  the  palm  to  tragedy  as  being  the  more 
perfect  art,  and  nothing  can  be  more  ingenious 
than  the  way  in  which  he  has  marshalled  his 
reasons.  He  tells  as  that  tragedy  as  well  as 


102  POETRY 

epic  is  capable  of  producing  its  effect  even  with- 
out action  ;  we  can  judge  of  it  perfectly,  says 
he,  by  reading.  He  goes  so  far  as  to  say  that, 
even  in  reading  as  well  as  in  representation, 
tragedy  has  an  advantage  over  the  epic,  the 
advantage  of  greater  clearness  and  distinctness 
of  impression.  And  in  some  measure  this  was 
perhaps  true  of  Greek  tragedy,  for  as  Miiller 
in  his  Dissertations  on  the  Eumenides  has  well 
said,  the  ancients  always  remained  and  wished  to 
remain  conscious  that  the  whole  was  a  Diony- 
sian  entertainment  ;  the  quest  of  a  common- 
place aTrartj  came  afterwards.  And  even  of 
of  Romantic  Drama  it  may  be  said  that  in  the 
time  of  Shakespeare,  and  indeed  down  through 
the  eighteenth  century,  it  never  lost  entirely 
its  character  of  a  recitation  as  well  as  a  drama. 
It  was  not  till  melodrama  began  to  be  recognised 
as  a  legitimate  form  of  dramatic  art  that  the 
dialogue  had  to  be  struck  from  the  dramatic 
action  "  at  full  speed "  —struck  like  sparks 
from  the  roadster's  shoes.  The  truth  is,  how- 
ever, that  it  was  idle  for  Aristotle  to  inquire 
which  is  the  more  important  branch  of  poetry, 
epic  or  tragedy. 

Equally  idle  would  it  be  for  the  modern  critic 
to  inquire  how  much  romantic  drama  gained  and 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      103 

how  much  it  lost  by  abandoning  the  chorus. 
Much  has  been  said  as  to  the  scope  and  the 
limits  of  epic  and  dramatic  poetry.  If  in  epic 
the  poet  has  the  power  to  take  the  imagination 
of  his  audience  away  from  the  dramatic  centre 
and  show  what  is  going  on  at  the  other  end  of 
the  great  web  of  the  world,  he  can  do  the  same 
thing  in  drama  by  the  chorus,  and  also  by  the 
introduction  into  the  dramatic  circle  of  mes- 
sengers and  others  from  the  outside  world. 

But  as  regards  epic  poetry,  is  it  right  that 
we  should  hear,  as  we  sometimes  do  hear,  the 
voice  of  the  poet  himself  as  chorus  bidding  us 
contrast  the  present  picture  with  other  pictures 
afar  off,  in  order  to  enforce  its  teaching  and 
illustrate  its  pathos  ?  This  is  a  favourite  method 
with  modern  poets  and  a  still  more  favourite 
one  with  prose  narrators.  Does  it  not  give 
an  air  of  self-consciousness  to  poetry  ?  Does 
it  not  disturb  the  intensity  of  the  poetic  vision  ? 
Yet  it  has  the  sanction  of  Homer  ;  and  who 
shall  dare  to  challenge  the  methods  of  the  great 
father  of  epic  ?  An  instance  occurs  in  Iliad  v. 
where,  in  the  midst  of  all  the  stress  of  fight, 
the  poet  leaves  the  dramatic  action  to  tell  us 
what  became  of  the  inheritance  of  Phaenops 
after  his  two  sons  had  been  slain  by  Diomedes. 


104  POETRY 

The  only  other  instance  occurs  in  iii.  243-4, 
where  the  poet,  after  Helen's  pathetic  mention 
of  her  brothers,  comments  on  the  causes  of 
their  absence,  generalizes  upon  the  impotence 
of  human  intelligence  —  the  impotence  even  of 
human  love  —  to  pierce  the  darkness  in  which 
the  web  of  human  fate  is  woven.  Thus  she 
spoke  (the  poet  tells  us)  ;  but  the  life-giving 
earth  already  possessed  them,  there  in  Lace- 
daemon,  in  their  dear  native  land  :  — 


iv   A.a.Kt$ai/j.ovi   avBi   0iAp   EV   TrarpiSt   yacy. 

This,  of  course,  is  '  beautiful  exceedingly," 
but,  inasmuch  as  the  imagination  at  work  is 
egoistic  or  lyrical,  not  dramatic,  inasmuch  as 
the  vision  is  relative  not  absolute,  it  does  not 
represent  that  epic  strength  at  its  very  highest 
which  we  call  specially  "  Homeric,"  unless  in- 
deed we  remember  that  with  Homer  the  Muses 
are  omniscient  ;  this  certainly  may  give  the 
passage  a  deep  dramatic  value  it  otherwise 
seems  to  lack. 

The  deepest  of  all  the  distinctions  between 
dramatic  and  epic  methods  has  relation,  how- 
ever, to  the  nature  of  the  dialogue.  Aristotle 
failed  to  point  it  out,  and  this  is  remarkable  un- 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      105 

til  we  remember  that  his  work  is  but  a  fragment 
of  a  great  system  of  criticism.  In  epic  poetry, 
and  in  all  poetry  that  narrates,  whether  the 
poet  be  Homer,  Chaucer,  Thomas  the  Rhymer, 
Gottfried  von  Strasburg,  or  Turoldus,  the  action, 
of  course,  moves  by  aid  partly  of  narrative 
and  partly  by  aid  of  dialogue,  but  in  drama  the 
dialogue  has  a  quality  of  suggestiveness  and 
subtle  inference  which  we  do  not  expect  to  find 
in  any  other  poetic  form  save  perhaps  that  of  the 
purely  dramatic  ballad. 

In  ancient  drama  this  quality  of  suggestive- 
ness  and  subtle  inference  is  seen  not  only  in  the 
dialogue,  but  in  the  choral  odes.  The  third  ode 
of  the  Agamemnon  is  an  extreme  case  in  point, 
where,  by  a  kind  of  double  entendre,  the  relations 
of  Clytsemnestra  and  vEgisthus  are  darkly  al- 
luded to  under  cover  of  allusions  to  Paris  and 
Helen.  Of  this  dramatic  subtlety  Sophocles  is 
perhaps  the  greatest  master  ;  and  certain  critics 
have  been  led  to  speak  as  though  irony  were 
the  heart-thought  of  Sophoclean  drama.  But  the 
suggestiveness  of  Sophocles  is  pathetic  (as 
the  late  Prof.  Lewis  Campbell  has  well  pointed 
out)  not  ironical.  This  is  one  reason  why  drama 
more  than  epic  seems  to  satisfy  the  mere  in- 
tellect of  the  reader,  though  this  may  be  coun- 


io6  POETRY 

terbalanced  by  the  hardness  of  mechanical 
structure  which  sometimes  disturbs  the  reader's 
imagination  in  tragedy. 

When,  for  instance,  a  dramatist  pays  so  much 
attention  to  the  evolution  of  the  plot  as  So- 
phocles doe?,  it  is  inevitable  that  his  characters 
should  be  more  or  less  plot-ridden  ;  they  have 
to  say  and  do  now  and  then  certain  things 
which  they  would  not  say  and  do  but  for  the 
exigencies  of  the  plot.  Indeed  one  of  the  ad- 
vantages which  epic  certainly  has  over  drama 
is  that  the  story  can  be  made  to  move  as  rapidly 
as  the  poet  may  desire  without  these  mechanical 
modifications  of  character. 

With  regard  to  the  difference  between  epic 
and  drama,  the  late  Leslie  Stephen  has  made 
some  admirable  remarks  upon  this  subject. 

"  A  play  may  be  read  as  well  as  seen,"  he 
says,  "  but  it  calls  for  an  effort  of  imagination 
on  the  part  of  the  reader  which  can  never  quite 
supply  the  place  of  actual  sight ;  and  the  play 
intended  only  for  the  study  becomes  simply  a 
novel  told  in  a  clumsy  method." 

The  artistic  question  raised  in  this  passage  is 
a  certain  answer  to  Aristotle.  Aristotle,  as  we 
have  seen,  decided  in  favour  of  dramatic  as 
against  narrative  art,  on  the  ground  that  a  play 
can  be  both  read  and  seen.  But  then  Aristotle's 
idea  of  a  play  was  very  different  from  the  mod- 
ern idea  of  dramatic  art.  Narrative  pure  and 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      107 

simple  formed  a  very  large  portion  of  a  Greek 
play.  Indeed,  in  one  of  the  tragedies  of  ^schy- 
lus,  the  '  Septem  contra  Thebas,'  the  messenger's 
narrative  and  enumeration  of  the  allied  chiefs, 
in  about  three  hundred  lines  or  more,  forms 
something  like  a  third  part  of  the  play,  while  a 
modern  drama,  even  by  an  Elizabethan,  con- 
sists of  dialogue  struck  rigidly  from  the  action. 
Still  the  drama  of  the  Elizabethans  was  a 
flexible  form  of  art.  It  gave  the  dramatist 
sufficient  room  and  freedom  not  only  to  depict 
his  characters,  but  to  develop  them  before  the 
eyes  of  the  audience,  not  so  fully,  indeed,  as 
characters  can  be  developed  in  prose  fiction, 
but  still  with  an  almost  sufficient  fulness.  If 
the  exigencies  of  the  contemporary  stage  are 
such  that  the  dramatist  can  do  this  no  longer, 
while  the  writers  of  plays  to  be  read  must  do 
it  in  order  to  achieve  anything  like  worthy  work, 
then  the  .difference  between  the  acted  and  the 
unacted  drama  is  so  wide  that  they  can  hardly 
be  placed  in  the  same  category.  This  being  so, 
is  or  is  not  the  mechanical  scaffolding  of  a  play 
an  encumbrance  to  the  writer,  and  an  impedi- 
ment to  the  movement  of  the  reader's  imagina- 
tion ?  Without  attempting  to  decide  upon  the 
point,  we  may  at  least  say  this,  that  a  form  of 
art  which  at  certain  periods  and  in  certain 
countries  is  flexible  may  become  inflexible  at 
certain  other  periods  and  in  certain  other 
countries  ;  and  that  the  moment  a  form  of  art 
has  lost  its  flexibility — lost  that  power  which 
should  enable  it  to  give  a  vital  picture  of  the 
time — it  ceases  to  be  a  good  literary  form,  and 


io8  POETRY 

there  is  no  need  to  try  to  kill  it,  it  will  die  a 
natural  death. 

Much  has  been  written  about  the  severance 
in  our  time  between  the  acted  drama  and 
dramatic  poetry.  That  the  growth  of  realism 
in  art  is  a  necessary  and  inevitable  result  of  that 
complexity,  and  that  searching  knowingness  of 
temper,  which  belong  to  a  social  arrangement 
like  that  of  modern  times  is  true.  It  is  true, 
too,  that  in  the  drama  especially  the  demand  of 
spectators  for  further  and  still  further  material 
illusion  makes  it  at  last  necessary  that  every 
speech  shall  have  a  theatric  raison  d'etre,  and 
almost  even  a  spectacular  one — that  every 
response,  in  short,  shall  be  struck  from  the 
dramatic  action,  so  to  speak,  as  the  spark  is 
struck  from  the  flint  and  steel.  And  this  being 
so,  a  closet  play  or  unacted  drama  seems  to  be 
the  only  form  of  poetic  art  still  remaining  in 
which  the  poet  is  able  to  develop  in  pure  poetic 
forms  his  conception  of  a  subtle  and  complex 
character,  as  he  would  in  the  time  of  Shakes- 
peare have  developed  it  in  an  acting  play. 

But  having  determined  to  produce  a  drama 
not  for  the  boards,  but  for  the  closet,  there 
arises  the  important  question  how  far  the  poet 
may  legitimately  free  himself  from  those  theatric 
conditions  which,  being  incidents  of  the  modern 
type  of  acted  drama,  are  really  incidents  of  a 
form  of  art  different  from  that  which  he  is 
attempting  ;  for  it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that 
the  points  which  aid  illusion  in  the  contem- 
porary theatre  tend  not  to  aid  but  to  destroy 
illusion  in  the  closet.  Take,  for  instance,  such 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      109 

a  drama  as  the  late  Lord  Lytton's  "  Lady  of 
Lyons,"  and,  again,  take  "  Philip  Van  Arte- 
velde "  or  Swinburne's  "  Bothwell."  In  the 
first  case  so  skilfully  is  the  dialogue  elicited  by 
the  theatric  situation  that  its  utter  falsity  to 
nature  is  forgotten  by  the  spectator ;  while  in 
the  other  two  plays  dialogue,  which  is  so  true 
to  nature  and  to  the  actual  facts  of  history  as 
to  produce  when  read  something  of  the  illusion 
of  a  contemporary  chronicle  is  so  little  sup- 
ported by  theatric  conditions  that  "  Philip  Van 
Artevelde,"  even  after  much  pruning,  does  not 
act  well,  while  "  Bothwell "  could  never  be  acted 
at  all.  A  single  act  of  thirteen  scenes,  and  a 
speech  of  several  hundred  verses  have  been  called 
monstrous,  and,  indeed,  are  monstrous  in  a 
tragedy.  Yet  it  is,  perhaps,  a  mere  question 
of  names  after  all.  Had  these  plays  been  called 
simply,  "  dramatic  chronicles,"  the  reply  to 
objectors  against  their  great  length  and  de- 
fective construction  would  be  by  a  question, 
What,  then,  is  the  proper  construction,  and 
what  is  the  proper  length  of  a  dramatic 
chronicle  ?  Clearly,  therefore,  there  is  very 
great  freedom  of  construction  allowed  to  the 
writer  of  a  modern  closet  play.  Yet  the  laws 
of  imaginative  art  are  here  not  less  inexorable 
than  they  were  in  an  acted  drama,  but  more 
so.  The  more  entirely  free  is  the  closet  drama 
from  the  conditions  of  theatrical  illusion,  the 
less  free  is  it  to  dispense  with  poetic  illusion, 
i.e.  with  that  dramatic  truth  which  the  specta- 
cular realism  of  the  theatre  can  alone  cause  us 
to  dispense  with  and  forget, 


no  POETRY 

"Because  things  seen  are  mightier  than  things  heard." 

The  only  kind  of  epic  for  Aristotle  to  consider 
was  Greek  epic,  between  which  and  all  other 
epic  the  difference  is  one  of  kind,  if  the  Iliad 
alone  is  taken  to  represent  Greek  epic.  In 
speaking  of  the  effect  that  surrounding  con- 
ditions seem  to  have  upon  the  form  in  which  the 
poetic  energy  of  any  time  or  country  should 
express  itself,  we  instanced  the  Iliad  as  a  typical 
case.  The  imagination  vivifying  it  is  mainly 
dramatic.  The  characters  represent  much  more 
than  the  mere  variety  of  mood  of  the  delineator. 
Notwithstanding  all  the  splendid  works  of 
Calderon,  Marlowe,  Webster  and  Goethe,  it  is 
doubtful  whether  as  a  born  dramatist  the  poet 
of  the  Iliad  does  not  come  nearer  to  ^Eschylus 
and  Shakespeare  than  does  any  other  poet.  His 
passion  for  making  the  heroes  speak  for  them- 
selves is  almost  a  fault  in  the  Iliad  considered 
as  pure  epic,  and  the  unconscious  way  in  which 
each  actor  is  made  to  depict  his  own  character 
is  in  the  highest  spirit  of  drama. 

It  is  owing  to  this  speciality  of  the  Iliad  that 
it  stands  apart  from  all  other  epic  save  that  of 
the  Odyssey,  where,  however,  the  dramatic 
vision  is  less  vivid.  It  is  owing  to  the  dramatic 
imagination  displayed  in  the  Iliad  that  it  is 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      in 

impossible  to  say,  from  internal  evidence, 
whether  the  poem  is  to  be  classified  with  the 
epics  of  growth  or  with  the  epics  of  art. 

In  poetic  art  the  more  Homerically  the  great 
fundamental  passions  of  man's  nature  are 
treated,  that  is  to  say,  the  more  simply  and 
singly,  the  more  powerful  is  the  effect.  Shakes- 
peare is  so  alive  to  this  great  law  of  the  human 
mind  that  he  sometimes  misses  an  easy  and 
obvious  method  of  lending  verisimilitude  to  a 
situation  rather  than  vex  his  audience  with  a 
multiplicity  of  motives,  as  in  the  relations 
between  Lear  and  Cordelia,  where  it  would  have 
been  easy  to  clear  the  old  king  from  the  obvious 
charge  of  fatuity  by  making  him  to  be  hood- 
winked as  to  Cordelia's  real  affection  by  some 
well-devised  plot  of  Goneril  and  Regan. 

All  epics  are  clearly  divisible  into  two  classes, 
first  those  which  are  a  mere  accretion  of  poems 
or  traditionary  ballads,  and  second,  those  which, 
though  based  indeed  on  tradition  or  history, 
have  become  so  fused  in  the  mind  of  one  great 
poet,  so  stained,  therefore,  with  the  colour  and 
temper  of  that  mind,  as  to  become  new  cry- 
stallizations— inventions,  in  short,  as  we  under- 
stand that  word.  Each  kind  of  epic  has  ex- 
cellencies peculiar  to  itself,  accompanied  by 
peculiar  and  indeed  necessary  defects.  In  the 
one  we  get  the  freedom — apparently  schemeless 
and  motiveless — of  nature,  but,  as  a  conse- 


ii2  POETRY 

quence,  miss  that  "  hard  acorn  of  thought " 
(to  use  the  picturesque  definition  in  the  Vol- 
sunga  Saga  of  the  heart  of  a  man)  which  the 
mind  asks  for  as  the  core  of  every  work  of  art. 
In  the  other  this  great  requisite  of  an  adequate 
central  thought  is  found,  but  accompanied  by  a 
constriction,  a  lack  of  freedom,  a  cold  artificiality 
the  obtrusion  of  a  pedantic  scheme,  which  would 
be  intolerable  to  the  natural  mind  unsophisti- 
cated by  literary  study.  The  flow  of  the  one  is 
as  that  of  a  river,  the  flow  of  the  other  as  that 
of  a  canal.  Yet,  as  has  been  already  hinted, 
though  the  great  charm  of  Nature  herself  is 
that  she  never  teases  us  with  any  obtrusive 
exhibitions  of  scheme,  she  doubtless  has  a 
scheme  somewhere,  she  does  somewhere  hide  a 
"  hard  acorn  of  thought "  of  which  the  poem 
of  the  universe  is  the  expanded  expression. 
And,  this  being  so,  art  should  have  a  scheme 
too  ;  but  in  such  a  dilemma  is  she  placed  in  this 
matter  that  the  epic  poet,  unless  he  is  evidently 
telling  the  story  for  its  own  sake,  scornful  of 
purposes  ethic  or  aesthetic,  must  sacrifice  illusion. 
Among  the  former  class  of  epics  are  to  be 
placed  the  great  epics  of  growth  such  as  the 
Mahabharata,  the  Niblung  story,  &c.;  among 
the  latter  the  Odyssey,  the  ^Eneid,  Paradise 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC  ART      113 

Lost,  the  Gerusalemme  Liberata,  the  Lusiadas. 

But  where  in  this  classification  are  we  to  find 
a  place  for  the  Iliad  ?  The  heart-thought  of  the 
greatest  epic  in  all  literature  is  simply  that 
Achilles  was  vexed,  and  that  the  fortunes  of  the 
world  depended  upon  the  whim  of  a  sulky  hero. 
Yet,  notwithstanding  all  the  acute  criticisms  of 
Wolff,  it  remains  difficult  for  us  to  find  a  place 
for  the  Iliad  among  the  epics  of  growth.  And 
why  ?  Because  throughout  the  Iliad  the 
dramatic  imagination  shown  is  of  the  first  order  ; 
and,  if  we  are  to  suppose  a  multiplicity  of 
authors  for  the  poem,  we  must  also  suppose  that 
ages  before  the  time  of  Pericles  there  existed  a 
group  of  dramatists  more  nearly  akin  to  the 
masters  of  the  great  drama,  ^Eschylus,  Sopho- 
cles, and  Shakespeare  than  any  group  that  has 
ever  existed  since.  Yet  it  is  equally  difficult  to 
find  a  place  for  it  amongst  the  epics  of  art. 
In  the  matter  of  artistic  motive  the  Odyssey 
stands  alone  among  the  epics  of  art  of  the 
world,  as  we  are  going  to  see. 

It  is  manifest  that,  as  the  pleasure  derived 
from  the  epic  of  art  is  that  of  recognizing  a 
conscious  scheme,  if  the  epic  of  art  fails  through 
confusion  of  scheme  it  fails  altogether.  What 
is  demanded  of  the  epic  of  art  (as  some  kind  of 

I 


H4  POETRY 

compensation  for  that  natural  freedom  of  evolu- 
tion which  it  can  never  achieve,  that  sweet 
abandon  which  belongs  to  nature  and  to  the 
epic  of  growth  alike)  is  unity  of  impression, 
harmonious  and  symmetrical  development  of  a 
conscious  heart-thought  or  motive.  This  being 
so,  where  are  we  to  place  the  vEneid,  and  where 
are  we  to  place  the  Shah  Nameh  ?  Starting 
with  the  intention,  as  it  seems,  of  fusing  into 
one  harmonious  whole  the  myths  and  legends 
upon  which  the  Roman  story  is  based,  Virgil, 
by  the  time  he  reaches  the  middle  of  his  epic, 
forgets  all  about  this  primary  intent,  and  gives 
us  his  own  thoughts  and  reflexions  on  things  in 
general.  Fine  as  is  the  speech  of  Anchises  to 
./Eneas  in  Elysium  (TEn.  vi.  724-755),  its  in- 
congruity with  the  general  scheme  of  the  poem 
as  developed  in  the  previous  books  shows  how 
entirely  Virgil  lacked  that  artistic  power  shown 
in  the  Odyssey  of  making  a  story  become  the 
natural  and  inevitable  outcome  of  an  artistic 
idea. 

In  the  Shah  Nameh,  there  is  the  artistic 
redaction  of  Virgil,  but  with  even  less  attention 
to  a  central  thought  than  Virgil  exhibits. 
Firdausi  relies  for  his  effects  upon  the  very 
qualities  which  characterize  not  the  epic  of  art, 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      115 

but  the  epic  of  growth — a  natural  and  not  an 
artificial  flow  of  the  story ;  so  much  so  indeed 
that,  if  the  Shah  Nameh  were  studied  in  con- 
nexion with  the  Iliad  on  the  one  hand,  and  with 
the  Kalevala  on  the  other,  it  might  throw  a 
light  upon  the  way  in  which  an  epic  may  be 
at  one  and  the  same  time  an  aggregation  of  the 
national  ballad  poems  and  the  work  of  a  single 
artificer.  That  Firdausi  was  capable  of  working 
from  a  centre  not  only  artistic  but  philosophic 
his  Yusuf  and  Zuleikha  shows  ;  and  if  we  con- 
sider what  was  the  artistic  temper  of  the  Per- 
sians in  Firdausi's  time,  what  indeed  has  been 
the  temper  during  the  whole  of  the  Moham- 
medan period,  the  subtle  temper  of  the  parable 
poet, — the  Shah  Nameh,  with  its  direct  appeal 
to  popular  sympathies,  is  a  standing  wonder 
in  poetic  literature. 

With  regard,  however,  to  Virgil's  defective 
power  of  working  from  an  artistic  motive,  as 
compared  with  the  poet  of  the  Odyssey,  this 
is  an  infirmity  he  shares  with  all  the  poets  of 
the  western  world.  Certainly  he  shares  it  with 
the  writer  of  Paradise  Lost,  who,  setting  out  to 
"  justify  the  ways  of  God  to  man,"  forgets 
occasionally  the  original  worker  of  the  evil,  as 
where,  for  instance,  he  substitutes  chance  as 


n6  POETRY 

soon  as  he  comes  (at  the  end  of  the  second  book) 
to  the  point  upon  which  the  entire  epic  move- 
ment turns,  the  escape  of  Satan  from  hell  and 
his  journey  to  earth  for  the  ruin  of  man  : — 

"  At  last  his  sail-broad  vans 
He  spreads  for  flight,  and,  in  the  surging  smoke 
Uplifted,  spurns  the  ground ;  thence  many  a  league, 
As  in  a  cloudy  chair,  ascending  rides 
Audacious,  but,  that  seat  soon  failing,  meets 
A  vast  vacuity ;  all  unawares, 
Fluttering  his  pinions  vain,  plumb  down  he  drops 
Ten  thousand  fathoms  deep,  and  to  this  hour 
Down  had  been  falling,  hadjnot,  by  ill  chance, 
The  strong  rebuff  of  some  tumultuous  cloud, 
Instinct  with  fire  and  nitre,  hurried  him 
As  many  miles  aloft." 

In  Milton's  case,  however,  the  truth  is  that 
he  made  the  mistake  of  trying  to  disturb  the 
motive  of  a  story  for  artistic  purposes — a  fatal 
mistake  as  we  shall  see  when  we  come  to  speak 
of  the  Nibelungenlied  in  relation  to  the  old 
Norse  epic  cycle. 

Though  Vondel's  mystery  play  of  Lucifer  is, 
in  its  execution,  rhetorical  more  than  poetical, 
it  did,  beyond  all  question  influence  Milton 
when  he  came  to  write  Paradise  Lost.  The 
famous  line  which  is  generally  quoted  as  the 
key-note  of  Satan's  character  :— 

"  Better  to  reign  in  hell  than  serve  in  heaven," 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      117 

seems  to  have  been  taken  bodily  from 
Vondel's  play,  and  Milton's  entire  epic  shows 
a  study  of  it.  While  Marlowe's  majestic  move- 
ments alone  are  traceable  in  Satan's  speech 
(written  some  years  before  the  rest  of  Paradise 
Lost,  when  the  dramatic  and  not  the  epic  form 
had  been  selected),  Milton's  Satan  became 
afterwards  a  splendid  amalgam  not  of  the 
Mephistopheles,  but  of  the  Famtus  of  Marlowe 
and  the  Lucifer  of  Vondel.  Vondel's  play  must 
have  possessed  a  peculiar  attraction  for  a  poet 
of  Milton's  views  of  human  progress.  Defective 
as  the  play  is  in  execution,  it  is  far  otherwise 
in  motive.  This  motive,  if  we  consider  it  aright, 
is  nothing  less  than  an  explanation  of  man's 
anomalous  condition  on  the  earth — spirit  in- 
carnate in  matter,  created  by  God,  a  little 
lower  than  the  angels — in  order  that  he  may 
advance  by  means  of  these  very  manacles  which 
imprison  him,  in  order  that  he  may  ascend  by 
the  staircase  of  the  world,  the  ladder  of  fleshly 
conditions,  above  those  cherubim  and  seraphim 
who,  lacking  the  education  of  sense,  have  not 
the  knowledge  wide  and  deep  which  brings  men 
close  to  God. 

Here  Milton  found  his  own  favourite  doctrine 
of  human  development  and  self-education  in  a 


n8  POETRY 

concrete  and  vividly  artistic  form.  Much, 
however,  as  such  a  motive  must  have  struck  a 
man  of  Milton's  instincts,  his  intellect  was  too 
much  chained  by  Calvinism  to  permit  of  his 
treating  the  subject  with  Vondel's  philosophic 
breadth.  The  cause  of  Lucifer's  wrath  had  to 
be  changed  from  jealousy  of  human  progress  to 
jealousy  of  the  son's  proclaimed  superiority. 
And  the  history  of  poetry  shows  that  once  begin 
to  tamper  with  the  central  thought  around 
which  any  group  of  incidents  has  crystallized, 
and  the  entire  story  becomes  thereby  re-written, 
as  we  have  seen  in  the  case  of  the  Agamemnon 
of  ^Eschylus.  Of  the  motive  of  his  own  epic, 
after  he  had  abandoned  the  motive  of  Vondel, 
Milton  had  as  little  permanent  grasp  as  Virgil 
had  of  his.  As  regards  the  Odyssey,  however, 
we  need  scarcely  say  that  its  motive  is  merely 
artistic,  not  philosophic.  And  now  we  come  to 
philosophic  motive. 

The  artist's  power  of  thought  is  properly 
shown  not  in  the  direct  enunciation  of  ideas, 
but  in  mastery  over  motive.  Here  ^Eschylus 
is  by  far  the  greatest  figure  in  Western  poetry 
—a  proof,  perhaps,  among  many  proofs  of  the 
Oriental  strain  of  his  genius.  (As  regards  pure 
drama,  however,  important  as  is  motive,  free- 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      119 

dom,  organic  vitality  in  every  part,  is  of  more 
importance  than  even  motive,  and  in  this 
freedom  and  easy  abandonment  the  concluding 
part  of  the  Oresteia  is  deficient  as  compared 
with  such  a  play  as  Othello  or  Lear}.  Notwith- 
standing the  splendid  exception  of  ^Eschylus, 
the  truth  seems  to  be  that  the  faculty  of  de- 
veloping a  poetical  narrative  from  a  philosophic 
thought  is  Oriental,  and  on  the  whole  foreign 
to  the  genius  of  the  Western  mind.  Neither  in 
Western  drama  nor  in  Western  epic  do  we  find, 
save  in  such  rare  cases  as  that  of  Vondel,  any- 
thing like  that  power  of  developing  a  story  from 
an  idea  which  not  only  Jami,  but  all  the  parable 
poets  of  Persia  show. 

In  recent  English  poetry,  the  motive  of 
Shelley's  dramatic  poem  Prometheus  Unbound 
is  a  notable  illustration  of  what  is  here  con- 
tended. Starting  with  the  full  intent  of  de- 
veloping a  drama  from  a  motive — starting  with 
a  universalism,  a  belief  that  good  shall  be  the 
final  goal  of  ill — Shelley  cannot  finish  his  first 
three  hundred  lines  without  shifting  (in  the 
curse  of  Prometheus)  into  a  Manichaeism  as 
pure  as  that  of  Manes  himself  :— 

"  Heap  on  thy  soul,  by  virtue  of  this  curse, 

111  deeds,  then  be  thou  damned,  beholding  good  ; 
Both  infinite  as  is  the  universe." 


120  POETRY 

According  to  the  central  thought  of  the  poem, 

*  """li 

human  nature,  through  the  heroic  protest  and 

/struggle  of  the  human  mind  typified  by  Pro- 
metheus, can  at  last  dethrone  that  super- 
natural terror  and  tyranny  (Jupiter)  which  the 
human  mind  had  itself  installed.  But,  after 
its  dethronement  (when  human  nature  becomes 
infinitely  perfectible),  how  can  the  super-natural 
tyranny  exist  apart  from  the  human  mind  that 
imagined  it  ?  How  can  it  be  as  "  infinite  as 
the  universe  ?  " 

The  motive  of  Paradise  Lost  is  assailed  with 
much  vigour  by  Victor  Hugo  in  his  poem 
Religions  et  Religion.  But  when  Hugo,  in  the 
after  parts  of  the  poem,  having  destroyed 
Milton's  "  God,"  sets  up  an  entirely  French 
"  Dieu  "  of  his  own  and  tries  "  to  justify  "  him, 
we  perceive  how  pardonable  was  Milton's  failure 
after  all.  Compare  such  defect  of  mental  grip 
and  such  nebulosity  of  thought  as  is  displayed 
by  Milton,  Shelley,  and  Hugo  with  the  strength 
of  hand  shown  in  the  "  Sdldman  "  and  "  Absal  " 
of  Jami,  and  indeed  by  the  Sufi  poets  generally. 

There  is,  however,  one  exception  to  this  rule 
that  Western  poetry  is  nebulous  as  to  motive. 
There  is,  besides  the  Iliad,  one  epic  that  refuses 
to  be  classified,  though  for  entirely  different 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      121 

reasons.  This  is  the  Niblung  story,  where  we 
find  unity  of  purpose  and  also  entire  freedom  of 
movement.  We  find  combined  here  beauties 
which  are  nowhere  else  combined — which  are, 
in  fact,  at  war  with  each  other  everywhere  else. 
We  find  a  scheme,  a  real  "  acorn  of  thought  " 
in  an  epic  which  is  not  the  self-conscious  work 
of  a  single  poetic  artificer,  but  is  as  much  the 
slow  growth  of  various  times  and  various  minds 
as  is  the  Mahabharata,  in  which  the  heart- 
thought  is  merely  that  the  Kauravas  defeated 
their  relatives  at  dice  and  refused  to  disgorge 
their  winnings. 

This  Northern  epic-tree,  as  we  find  it  in  the 
Icelandic  sagas,  the  Norns  themselves  must 
have  watered  ;  for  it  combines  the  virtues  of 
the  epic  of  growth  with  those  of  the  epic  of  art. 
Though  not  written  in  metre,  it  may  usefully  be 
compared  with  the  epics  of  Greece  and  of  India 
and  Persia.  Free  in  movement  as  the  wind, 
which  "  bloweth  where  it  listeth,"  it  listeth  to 
move  by  law.  Its  action  is  that  of  free-will, 
but  free-will  at  play  within  a  ring  of  necessity. 
Within  this  ring  there  throbs  all  the  warm  and 
passionate  life  of  the  world  outside,  and  all  the 
freedom  apparently.  Yet  from  that  world  is 
enisled  by  a  cordon  of  curses — by  a  zone  of 


122  POETRY 

defiant  flames  more  impregnable  than  that  which 
girdled  the  beautiful  Brynhild  at  Hindfell. 
Natural  laws,  familiar  emotions,  are  at  work 
everywhere  in  the  story  ;  yet  the  '  Ring  of 
Andvari,"  whose  circumference  is  but  that  of 
a  woman's  ringer,  encircles  the  whole  mimic 
world  of  the  sagaman  as  the  Midgard  snake 
encircles  the  earth. 

For  this  artistic  perfection  in  an  epic  of 
growth  there  are,  of  course,  many  causes,  some 
of  them  traceable,  and  some  of  them  beyond  all 
discovery — causes  no  doubt  akin  to  those  which 
gave  birth  to  many  of  the  beauties  of  other 
epics  of  growth.  Originally  Sinfiotli  and  Sigurd 
were  the  same  person,  and  note  how  vast  has 
been  the  artistic  effect  of  the  separation  of  the 
two  !  Again,  there  were  several  different  ver- 
sions of  the  story  of  Brynhild.  The  sagamen, 
finding  all  these  versions  too  interesting  and  too 
much  beloved  to  be  discarded,  adopted  them 
all — worked  them  up  into  one  legend,  so  that, 
in  the  Volsunga  Saga  we  have  a  heroine  possess- 
ing all  the  charms  of  goddess,  demi-goddess, 
earthly  princess,  and  amazon — a  heroine  sur- 
passing perhaps  in  fascination  all  other  heroines 
that  have  ever  figured  in  poetry. 

It  is  when  we  come  to  consider  such  imagina- 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      123 

tive  work  as  this  that  we  are  compelled  to  pause 
before  challenging  the  Aristotelian  doctrine  that 
metrical  structure  is  but  an  accidental  quality 
of  epic. 

In  speaking  of  the  Niblung  story  we  do  not, 
of  course,  speak  of  the  German  version,  the 
Nibelungenlied,  a  fine  epic  still,  though  a  de- 
gradation of  the  elder  form.  Between  the  two 
the  differences  are  fundamental  in  the  artistic 
sense,  and  form  an  excellent  illustration  of  what 
has  just  been  said  upon  the  disturbance  of 
motive  in  epic,  and  indeed  in  all  poetic  art. 
It  is  not  merely  that  the  endings  of  the  three 
principal  characters  Sigurd  (Siegfried),  Gudrun 
(Kriemhilt),  and  Brynhild  are  entirely  different ; 
it  is  not  merely  that  the  Icelandic  version,  by 
missing  the  blood-bath  at  Famir's  lair,  loses  the 
pathetic  situation  of  Gudrun's  becoming  after- 
wards an  unwilling  instrument  of  her  husband's 
death ;  it  is  not  merely  that,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  German  version,  by  omitting  the  early  love 
passages  between  Brynhild  and  Sigurd  at  Hind- 
fall,  misses  entirely  the  tragic  meaning  of  her 
story  and  the  terrible  hate  that  is  love  resulting 
from  the  breaking  of  the  troth ;  but  the  con- 
clusion of  each  version  is  so  exactly  the  opposite 
of  that  of  the  other  that,  while  the  German 


124  POETRY 

story  is  called  (and  very  properly)  "  Kriemhilt's 
Revenge,"  the  story  of  the  Volsunga  Saga  might, 
with  equal  propriety,  be  called  Gudrun's  For- 
giveness. 

If  it  be  said  that,  in  both  cases,  the  motive 
shows  the  same  Titanic  temper,  that  is  because 
the  Titanic  temper  is  the  special  characteristic 
of  the  North- Western  mind.  The  temper  of 
revolt  against  authority  seems  indeed  to  belong 
to  that  energy  which  succeeds  in  the  modern 
development  of  the  great  racial  struggle  for  life. 
Although  no  epic,  Eastern  or  Western,  can  exist 
without  a  struggle  between  good  and  evil — and 
a  struggle  upon  apparently  equal  terms — it 
must  not  be  supposed  that  the  warring  of  con- 
flicting forces,  which  is  the  motive  of  the  Eastern 
epic  has  much  real  relation  to  the  warring  of 
conflicting  forces,  which  is  the  motive  of  Western 
epic. 

And,  as  regards  the  machinery  of  epic,  there  is, 
we  suspect,  a  deeper  significance  than  is  com- 
monly apprehended  in  the  fact  that  the  Satan 
or  Shaitan  of  the  Eastern  world  becomes  in 
Vondel  and  Milton  a  sublime  Titan  who  attracts 
to  himself  the  admiration  which  in  Eastern 
poetry  belongs  entirely  to  the  authority  of 
heaven.  In  Asia,  save  perhaps  among  the  pure 


VARIETIES   OF  POETIC   ART      125 

Arabs  of  the  desert,  underlying  all  religious 
forms,  there  is  apparent  a  temper  of  resignation 
to  the  irresistible  authority  of  heaven.  And  as 
regards  the  Aryans  it  is  probable  that  the 
Titanic  temper — the  temper  of  revolt  against 
authority — did  not  begin  to  show  itself  till  they 
had  moved  across  the  Caucasus.  But  what 
concerns  us  here  is  the  fact  that  the  farther 
they  moved  to  the  North  west  the  more  vigor- 
ously this  temper  asserted  itself,  the  prouder 
grew  man  in  his  attitude  towards  the  gods, 
till  at  last  in  the  Scandinavian  cycle  he  became 
their  equal,  and  struggled  alongside  them, 
shoulder  to  shoulder,  in  the  defence  of  heaven 
against  the  assaults  of  hell. 

Therefore,  as  we  say,  the  student  of  epic 
poetry  must  not  suppose  that  there  is  any  real 
parallel  between  the  attitude  of  Vishnu  (as 
Rama)  towards  Ravana  and  the  attitude  of 
Prometheus  towards  Zeus,  or  the  attitude  of  the 
human  heroes  towards  Odin  in  Scandinavian 
poetry.  Had  Ravana  been  clothed  with  a 
properly  constituted  authority,  had  he  been  a 
legitimate  god  instead  of  a  demon,  the  Eastern 
doctrine  of  recognition  of  authority  would  most 
likely  have  come  in,  and  the  world  would  have 
been  spared  one  at  least  of  its  enormous  epics. 


126  POETRY 

Indeed,  the  Ravana  of  the  Rdmayana  answers 
somewhat  to  the  Fafnir  of  the  Vtilsunga  Saga  ; 
and  to  plot  against  demons  is  not  to  rebel 
against  authority.  The  vast  field  of  Indian  epic, 
however,  is  quite  beyond  us  here. 

Nor  can  we  do  more  than  glance  at  the 
Kalevala.  From  one  point  of  view  that  group  of 
ballads  might  be  taken,  no  doubt,  as  a  simple 
record  of  how  the  men  of  Kalevala  were  skilful 
in  capturing  the  sisters  of  the  Pojohla  men. 
But  from  another  point  of  view  the  universal 
struggle  of  the  male  for  the  female  setms 
typified  in  this  so-called  epic  of  the  Finns  by  the 
picture  of  the  "  Lady  of  the  Rainbow  "  sitting 
upon  her  glowing  arc,  and  weaving  her  golden 
threads,  while  the  hero  is  doing  battle  with  the 
malevolent  forces  of  nature. 

But  it  is  in  the  Niblung  story  that  the  temper 
of  Western  epic  is  at  its  best — the  temper  of  the 
simple  fighter  whose  business  is  to  fight.  The 
ideal  Western  fighter  was  not  known  in  Greece 
till  ages  after  Homer,  when  in  the  pass  of 
Thermopylae  the  companions  of  Leonidas  combed 
their  long  hair  in  the  sun.  The  business  of  the 
fighter  in  Scandinavian  epic  is  to  yield  to  no 
power  whatsoever,  whether  of  earth,  or  heaven, 
or  hell — to  take  a  buffet  from  the  All-father 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      127 

himself,  and  to  return  it ;  to  look  Destiny  her- 
self in  the  face,  crying  out  for  quarter  neither 
to  gods  nor  demons,  nor  Norns. 

This  is  the  true  temper  of  pure  "  heroic 
poetry  "  as  it  has  hitherto  flourished  on  this 
side  of  the  Caucasus — the  temper  of  the  fighter 
who  is  invincible  because  he  feels  that  Fate  her- 
self falters  when  the  hero  of  the  true  strain 
defies — the  fighter  who  feels  that  the  very 
Norns  themselves  must  cringe  at  last  before  the 
simple  courage  of  man  standing  naked  and  bare 
of  hope  against  all  assaults  whether  of  heaven 
or  hell  or  doom.  The  proud  heroes  of  the 
Volsunga  Saga  utter  no  moans  and  shed  no 
Homeric  tears,  knowing  as  they  know  that  the 
day  prophesied  is  sure  when,  shoulder  to  shoul- 
der, gods  and  men  shall  stand  up  to  fight  the 
entire  brood  of  night  and  evil,  storming  the  very 
gates  of  Asgard. 

That  this  temper  is  not  the  highest  from  the 
ethical  point  of  view  is  no  doubt  true.  Against 
the  beautiful  resignation  of  Buddhism  it  may 
seem  barbaric,  and  if  moral  suasion  could  sup- 
plant physical  force  in  epic — if  Siddartha  could 
take  the  place  of  Achilles  or  Sigurd — it  might  be 
better  for  the  human  race. 

Returning    now    to    the    general    subject    of 


128  POETRY 

egoistic,  or  lyrical  and  dramatic  imagination — 
as  might  be  expected,  we  occasionally  meet 
imagination  of  a  purely  dramatic  kind  in 
narrative  poetry,  such  for  instance  as  that  of 
Gottfried  von  Strasburg,  of  Chaucer,  and  of  the 
author  of  the  Chanson  de  Roland. 

.  It  is  in  the  moulding  of  characters  that  the 
narrative  poet  competes  with  the  prose  story- 
teller. And  here  again  Chaucer  is  the  great 
model.  It  is  but  natural  that  opinions  should 
greatly  differ  about  his  place  among  the  highest 
names. 

If  it  be  said  of  him  that  he  has  no  prophetic 
gift,  that  he  is  no  seer,  like  ^schylus  and  Dante, 
like  Milton  and  Shelley,  the  impeachment  can- 
not be  answered,  for  it  is  true.  May  a  poet  lay 
claim  to  a  place  in  the  first  rank,  and  yet  be 
no  seer  ?  There  are  poets  who  are  organized  to 
see  more  clearly  than  we  can  ourselves  see  the 
riches  of  the  "  world  at  hand  "  ;  do  they  rank 
below  those  who  are  so  dazzled  by  gazing  above 
it,  and  beyond  it,  that  not  only  the  flowers  and 
grass  and  trees  of  the  earth,  but  even  its  men 
and  women,  are  common  and  superfluous  ? 

Of  the  simply  terrene  poets  Chaucer  is  the 
king.  If  health  in  poetry  is  the  sweet  accept- 
ance and  melodious  utterance  of  the  beauty  of 
the  world  as  it  is,  Chaucer  is  the  most  healthy 
poet  that  has  appeared  in  any  literature.  His 
delight  is  to  represent. 

Of  all  poets  he  is  the  most  purely  artistic ; 
so  that  he  can  paint,  for  his  own  enjoyment  ancl 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      129 

ours,  a  beautiful  picture,  he  cares  not  from 
what  source  he  draws  his  materials.  The 
riches  and  the  wonderfulness  of  life — these  are 
his  theme — a  theme  which  is  as  fresh  and  de- 
lightful now  as  it  was  in  his  time,  and  as  fresh 
and  delightful  as  it  was  when  all  those  count- 
less stories  of  romantic  adventure  upon  which 
his  poetry  and  all  the  imaginative  literature  of 
the  West  are  built  were  lisped  in  the  Aryan 
cradle.  Marlowe's  "Hero  and  Leander"  is  a 
splendid  piece  of  narrative  poetry,  incompar- 
ably finer  than  Shakespeare's  "  Venus  and 
Adonis,"  and  shows  yet  another  side  of  his 
superb  genius.  A  famous  passage  in  Keats's 
"  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  "  was  certainly  suggested  by 
Marlowe's  couplet, 

"  Mermaid-like,  unto  the  floor  she  slid  ; 
One  half  appeared — the  other  half  was  hid." 

Character  drawing  in  poetry  as  the  result  of 
relative  vision  is  no  doubt  the  same  as  character 
drawing  in  prose  art. 

The  true  artist  is  not  he  who  paints  exactly 
what  he  sees,  nor  he  whose  sentimental,  humor- 
ous, aesthetic,  or  ethical  purpose  is  obtrusively 
apparent ;  but  he  who,  while  really  fashioning 
his  characters  out  of  broad  general  elements 
from  universal  types  of  humanity — at  the  same 
time  deceives  us  into  mistaking  these  characters 
for  real  biographies — deceives  us  by  appearing 
(from  his  mastery  over  the  properties  of  the 
"fictionist")  to  be  drawing  from  particulars — 
from  peculiar  individual  traits  instead  of  from 
generalities — and  especially  by  never  obtruding, 

K 


130  POETRY 

but  rather  by  hiding  away  from  us,  all  senti- 
mental, humorous,  aesthetic,  or  ethical  purposes. 

Chaucer  is  still  perhaps  our  greatest  narrative 
poet.  Scott  is  very  great,  but  his  lack  of  artistic 
conscience  damages  and  weakens  his  work. 

It  must  be  said  of  narrative  poets  generally 
that  they  are  apt  to  fail  in  "  making  their  flats 
join  "  to  use  a  striking  locution  of  the  stage. 
Victor  Hugo,  for  instance,  paints  his  flats  most 
brilliantly,  but  when  he  comes  to  put  them 
together,  it  is  remarkable  how  clumsy  his  work 
is.  "  La  L£gende  des  Siecles,"  for  instance, 
consists  of  a  vast  number  of  poems,  having  as 
much  connection  with  each  other  as  "  marbles 
in  a  bag,"  to  use  Coleridge's  expressive  phrase. 

"  La  Legende  des  Siecles "  pretends  to  be 
an  epic  of  which  a  vast  number  of  hetero- 
geneous poems  are  thrown  together. 

The  first  series  consisted  of  a  collection  of 
detached  scenes  from  history  and  legend  (pro- 
duced evidently  at  various  times  as  the  poet's 
discoursive  reading  suggested  them),  scenes 
beginning  with  the  birth  of  Eve's  firstborn,  and 
ending  with  "  La  Trompette  du  Jugement." 

The  second  series  is  more  heterogeneous, 
consisting  of  narrative,  homily,  lyric,  satire, 
drama — a  collection  for  which  an  English  poet 
would  have  been  quite  unable  to  find  any  better 
name  than  "  Poems  "  or  "  Poems  and  Dramatic 
Scenes,"  but  for  which  the  quick  genius  of  a 
countryman  of  Taine  and  the  author  of  the 
Com&die  Humaine  could  easily  find  a  more 
ambitious  title,  having  most  likely  "  Dieu," 
"  L'Ame,"  and  "  L'Homme,"  for  the  noun 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      131 

substantives — a  collection,  in  short,  which  Victor 
Hugo  would  naturally  call  "  The  Legend  of  the 
Ages." 

The  first  volume  of  the  second  series  opens 
with  a  poem,  entitled  "  La  Vision  d'ou  est  sorti 
ce  Livre,"  in  which,  as  in  the  Preface  to  the 
first  series,  the  poet  endeavours  to  show  that 
there  is  a  great  idee  mire  in  these 

"Orient  pearls  at  random  strung." 

Fortunately,  however,  as  the  reader  goes  on, — 
or,  rather,  is  carried  along, — breathless  from 
beauty  to  beauty,  from  glory  to  glory,  he  finds 
to  his  delight  that  there  is  no  such  idee  mere 
at  all — nothing  but  poetry  ;  that  there  is  no 
hint  of  that  appalling  "  Fin  de  Satan  "  ;  nothing 
to  dread  from  "  Dieu." 

The  power  of  thought  in  the  artist  is,  of  course, 
properly  shown,  not  in  ratiocination,  but  in  the 
invention  of  motif.  And  Victor*  Hugo's  "La 
Legende  des  Siecles "  written  under  various 
impulses,  and  thrown  together  as  recklessly,  it 
would  almost  seem,  as  Shakespeare's  sonnets — 
we  are  asked  to  accept,  as  embodying  the 
greatest  motif  cognizable  by  the  mind  of  man, 
or,  rather,  they  are  to  be  taken  as  part  of  the 
great  embodiment ;  for  "  La  Legende  des 
Siecles  "  is  only  part  of  an  enormous  epic  of  the 
Universe,  of  which  "  Dieu  "  is  the  protagonist 
and  "  LTnfini  "  the  field  of  action. 

Now  it  is  just  when  we  do  come  to  consider 
these  poems  as  integral  parts  of  that  vast 
organic  whole, — of  any  organic  whole;  it  is  just 


132  POETRY 

when  we  do  come  to  consider  Victor  Hugo's 
claims  as  a  philosopher,  who,  looking  over 
Past,  Present,  and  Future,  has  something  new 
to  tell  us  about  "  Dieu,"  "  La  Fin  de  Satan," 
and  the  "  Legend  of  Ages  "  —some  explanation 
to  offer  us  of  "  the  painful  riddle  of  the  earth," 
of  the  wonder  and  the  mystery  of  the  human 
story — that  we  see  how  deficient  is  this  great 
poet. 

Unless  the  philosophic  power  of  a  poet  is  of 
the  first  order,  so  gigantic  a  conception  as  that 
of  Victor  Hugo  would  of  itself,  we  think,  be  a 
sign  of  an  ill-balanced  and  imperfect  artistic 
mind. 

The  true  artist's  yearning  for  perfection 
causes  him  to  feel  more  pleasure  in  the  perfect 
representation  of  a  leaf  than  in  the  picture  of  a 
boundless  forest,  which,  from  its  very  extent, 
must  be  imperfect. 

And  we  will  venture  to  say  that  the  poems  in 
"  La  Le*gende  des  Siecles,"  have,  as  a  group, 
nothing  whatever  to  do  with  any  Legend  of 
Ages — nothing  whatever  to  do  with  expounding 
the  enigma  of  "  cette  grande  figure,  lugubre  et 
rayennante,  fatale  et  sacr£e,  1'Homme  "  :  that 
they  have,  as  a  group,  no  idle  mhe  whatever, 
save  the  very  familiar  one  that  man's  life  in  the 
world  has  been  sad  and  chequered. 

An  artist's  moral  system  is  to  be  judged  not 
by  his  direct  preachments,  but  by  his  artistic 
representations.  If,  for  instance,  he  depicts 
man  as  acting  habitually  like  a  devil,  it  is  idle 
for  him  to  discourse  to  us  of  man  as  an  angel. 

Now,  a  speciality  of  Hugo's  imaginative  work, 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      133 

whether  in  prose  or  verse,  is  that,  while  he  is  for 
ever  talking  about  God  and  the  goodness  of 
God  as  contrasted  with  the  wickedness  of  that 
mysterious  and  universal  malefactor  called 
Society,  he  so  arranges  the  circumstances  of  his 
drama  and  his  stories  that  the  reader  is  likely 
to  rise  from  reading  them  with  the  impression 
that  there  is  no  God  at  all,  or  at  least  that  there 
is  no  moral  governor  of  the  universe.  This  must 
be  said  not  only  of  the  poems  in  "La  Legende 
des  Siecles,"  but  also  in  such  works  as  "  Le  Roi 
s' Amuse, "5"  Notre  Dame  de  Paris,"  "  Marion 
Delorme,"  "  Lucrece  Borgia,"  "  Ruy  Bias," 
and  "  Torquemada." 

Of  course  he  has  a  perfect  right  to  represent 
human  life  in  this  way  if  he  honestly  believes 
it  to  be  a  true  representation. 

But  the  artist  who  generally  divides  his 
characters  into  two  classes — monsters  of  cruelty 
and  injustice  ("les  rois  "  for  the  most  part), 
and  paragons  of  all  the  virtues  who  become  the 
inevitable  and  helpless  victims  of  these — should 
not  talk  about  the  good  God,  but  should  pro- 
claim at  once  his  belief  that  the  world  is  governed 
by  blind  fatality  or  by  blind  chance. 

The  truth  is,  however,  that  Hugo  has  no 
philosophical  system  at  all,  and  it  is  merely 
because  these  cruel  and  violent  situations  are 
striking  and  harrowing  that  he  makes  such 
liberal  use  of  them. 

But  apart  altogether  from  questions  of  an 
ethical  or  a  philosophical  kind,  it  is  an  artistic 
mistake  to  go  on  heaping  woes  upon  the  heads 
of  perfectly  innocent  people. 


134  POETRY 

The  question  of  the  apapria  ueyaA»j  spoken 
of  by  Artisotle  is,  of  course,  too  large  to  be 
discussed  here.  And  perhaps,  if  we  con- 
sider it,  Aristotle's  requirement  was  hardly 
an  artistic  one  at  all,  for  it  should  be  borne  in 
mind  that  Aristotle  required  an  exhibition  of 
some  faults  in  the  suffering  hero  merely  to 
elude  the  difficulty  of  touching  upon  impiety 
to  the  gods,  from  whose  fatal  decrees  all  mis- 
fortunes spring. 

But,  artistically  speaking,  there  is  something 
inherently  revolting  in  such  spectacles  as  the 
death  of  Esmeralda,  in  the  drawing  of  the  tooth 
of  Fantine,  and  in  the  seizure  by  the  blood- 
thirsty monks  of  the  Inquisition  of  a  pair  of 
perfectly  innocent  lovers  who  are  carried  off 
from  their  dreams  of  bliss  to  be  burnt  alive. 

Nor  has  Hugo  that  didactic  reason  for  thus 
shocking  us  which  an  ancient  writer  would  have 
had  whose  gods  werfe  themselves  the  final  cause 
of  the  entire  tragic  mischief — that  didactic  reason, 
in  short,  which  Aristotle  seems  to  glance  at  as 
being  immoral. 

Mostly  the  gods  were  the  direct  cause  of  this 
tragic  mischief ;  but  as  Marmontel  has  ex- 
cellently said  (Poetique  Franfoise,  ii.  119)  :— 

"  Si,  dans  la  trag^die  ancienne,  la  passion  est  quel- 
quefois  I'instrument  ou  la  cause  du  malheur,  ce  malheur 
ne  tombe  done  pas  sur  1'homme  passionne',  mais  sur 
quelque  victime  innocente." 

These  words  might  almost  have  been  written  of 
Hugo's  entire  dramatic  system  ;  but  then  he 
believes  in  a  God  who  is  not  the  cause  of  the 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      135 

tragic  mischief,  and  such  representations  as 
those  we  allude  to  are  as  faulty  in  morals  as  they 
are  in  art.  Yet  they  are  striking,  and  that  is 
enough  for  most  French  poets.  Reservation  of 
power  is  now  almost  unknown  in  French  art. 

But  we  are  wandering  from  the  subject  of  the 
difficulty  poets  experience  in  trying  to  join  flats 
that  have  been  painted  at  various  times  and  in 
various  moods.  Tennyson  affords  us  a  striking 
example  of  this  in  "  The  Idylls  of  the  King." 
In  1842  he  published  the  "  Morte  d' Arthur." 
For  every  variety  of  excellence  it  was  as  a 
"  flat  "  one  of  the  very  finest  ever  produced  in 
this  country.  He  himself,  indeed,  considered  it 
to  consist,  as  he  says,  of  "  Homeric  echoes  "  ; 
and  though  this  was  not  wonderful,  seeing  that 
all  poets  consider  their  heroic  poetry  to  consist 
of  "  Homeric  echoes,"  it  was  wonderful  that 
Landor  should  pronounce  it  not  only  "  more 
Homeric  than  any  poem  of  our  time  "  (which 
it  could  so  easily  be),  but  also  say  it  "  rivalled 
some  of  the  noblest  parts  of  the  Odyssey  "  ;  for 
no  one  knew  better  than  Landor  that  the 
"  Morte  d' Arthur  "  is  Virgilian,  or  rather  it  is 
Virgil  plus  Lucretius.  Years  afterwards  Tenny- 
son produced  a  good  many  flats,  exceedingly 
fine  too,  exceedingly  like  each  other,  and 
exceedingly  unlike  flat  the  first,  and  again  at 
intervals  he  produced  others  equally  unlike  the 
richly  painted  flat  with  which  he  began.  And 
then  he  proceeded  to  join  them.  The  idyllic 
simplicity  of  "  Enid  "  became  absolute  baldness 
by  the  side  of  the  magnificence  of  the  "  Morte 
d' Arthur  "  ;  the  magnificence  of  the  "  Morte 


136  POETRY 

d' Arthur "  became  something  like  magnilo- 
quence by  the  side  of  "  Enid."  With  "  The 
Lotos  Eaters,"  however,  Tennyson  was  more 
successful  in  joining  the  flats  produced  at 
various  times.  It  is  one  of  the  finest  poems  in 
the  world. 

As  to  "  Dieu,"  if  we  were  to  accept  Hugo's 
conception  of  Dieu,  what  kind  of  a  Dieu  should 
we  get  ? 

And  here  it  may  be  worth  while  to  discuss  a 
question  which  is,  we  think,  very  important. 
How  is  it  that  so  few  poets  could,  even  granting 
them  the  genius,  produce  work  to  affect  the 
reader  as  Tennyson's  "  Rizpah  "  does  ?  The 
answer  is  that  it  is  because  a  story  in  which  is 
contained  such  a  vast  amount  of  pity  and  terror 
cannot  be  treated  in  any  way  that  is  tolerable 
at  all  save  by  a  poet  who  is  entirely  superior  to 
the  infirmity  common  to  most  poets — pride  of 
poetic  power. 

Pride  of  power  has  never  yet  been  treated  as 
an  important  agent  of  poetical  production.  It 
may  be  said,  no  doubt,  that  after  vanity,  which 
is  first,  pride  is  the  great  motor  of  human 
action. 

Just  as  a  man  with  an  exceptional  power  of 
wind  and  limb  takes  pride  in  risking  his  neck 
on  Mont  Blanc,  and  just  as  a  rich  citizen  takes 
pride  in  displaying  the  length  and  strength  of 
his  purse,  so  the  poet,  the  moment  he  is  hailed 
as  the  possessor  of  poetical  power,  feels  im- 
pelled at  once  to  pose  as  a  poetical  athlete. 
He  knows  well  enough,  of  course,  that  his  duty 
as  an  artist  is  to  use  pity  and  terror  merely  so 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      137 

as  to  produce  an  effect  which  is  at  bottom 
pleasurable.  But  he  cares  nothing  at  all  about 
giving  his  readers  pleasure.  He  wants  to  dis- 
play his  power.  He  must  give  us  pictures  of 
the  "  Furies "  so  terrible  that  he  narrowly 
escapes  being  torn  to  pieces  by  the  real  furies 
he  has  awakened  in  the  breasts  of  his  audience. 
He  must  give  us  pictures  of  hell  that  make 
Christianity  itself  seem  wicked.  He  must 
harrow  us. 

He  must,  in  short,  show  in  the  style  of  "  Titus 
Andronicus,"  "  The  Duchess  of  Main,"  "  Man- 
fred," "  The  Cenci,"  how  strong  he  is  at  the 
expense  of  all  the  holiest  sanctions  of  art,  till 
mankind  becomes  sickened  at  the  display,  and 
is  inclined  to  beg  the  poets  to  return  to  their 
golden  clime,  and  not  turn  our  clime  into 
a  pandemonium  of  unholy  passions,  or  into 
shambles  of  blood  and  bones. 

It  follows  from  the  foregoing  remarks  that  a 
most  important  thing  for  a  narrative  poet  to 
exercise  his  mind  upon  is  the  choice  of  a  story. 

In  considering  whether  or  not  a  story  is 
adapted  for  artistic  purposes,  the  poet  has  to 
bear  in  mind  that  the  first  quest  of  a  poet,  as  a 
poet,  is  beauty.  Whenever  a  subject  is  of  such 
a  kind  that  in  treating  it  the  poet,  in  order  to 
avoid  the  unlovely,  must  greatly  curb  his 
imagination,  it  is  unfit  for  poetical  treatment. 
There  is  no  truth  in  art  more  obvious  than  this  ; 
yet  there  is  none  which  has  been  more  ignored 
in  all  poetical  literature. 

Let  us  turn  to  two  of  the  many  poems  in  the 
English  language  whose  plot  is  derived  from 


138  POETRY 

the  Italian  novelists,  Boccaccio,  Bandello,  Cin- 
thio  and  others — Keats's  "  Isabella "  and 
Tennyson's  "  Lover's  Tale,"  both  from  Boccac- 
cio. 

If  the  poet  will  touch  upon  themes  that  are 
too  painful  (and  often  the  poet  is  an  expresser 
rather  than  a  man  who  deeply  feels) — if  he  will, 
for  the  sake  of  strong  writing,  depict  Isabella 
kissing  the  mutilated  head  of  the  man  she  loved 
—he  cannot  expect  that  all  the  poetic  power 
in  the  world  will  reconcile  to  his  work  the  mind 
which  is  at  once  healthy  and  sorely  tried.  And 
it  is  here  that  Keats  has  in  some  degree  fallen 
short  of  Boccaccio  in  instinctive  surety  of 
treatment. 

In  Bo.ccaccio's  story  are  the  simple  words, 
"  She  cut  off  the  head,  which  she  put  into  a 
handkerchief,"  instead  of  all  Keats's  elaborate 
details  about  the  mutilation. 

With  regard  to  Tennyson,  who  in  his  tre- 
mendous poem  of  "  Rizpah  "  depicts  the  mother 
beneath  the  gibbet  picking  up  the  bones  of  her 
dead  son  and  treasuring  them,  and  goes  through 
it  without  one  false  note,  would  never  have 
failed  where  Keats  fails  in  his  story  of  "  Isa- 
bella." But  he  does  so  in  his  "  Lover's  Tale." 

Boccaccio's  story  of  Gentil  de  Carisendi's 
adventure  with  Niccoluccio  Caccianimico's  wife 
has  the  advantage  of  being  one  of  the  most  worn 
of  sensational  stories,  and  therefore  deserves 
Tennyson's  selection  of  it.  Signer  Gentil  de 
Carisendi,  a  knight  of  Bologna,  according  to 
Boccaccio's  novel,  loved  a  married  woman  of 
great  beauty,  but,  unlike  certain  other  of 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      139 

Boccaccio's  heroes,  was  too  honourable  to 
declare  his  passion.  Having,  however,  heard 
that  she  had  suddenly  died,  he  visited  her  tomb 
in  order  "  to  please  himself  with  a  kiss."  He 
then  perceived  that  her  heart  was  feebly  beating, 
and  by  the  aid  of  his  servant,  who  had  accom- 
panied him,  carried  her  oft  to  his  house  at 
Bologna.  Here,  on  being  restored  to  con- 
sciousness by  Gentil's  mother,  the  lady  gave 
birth  to  a  son.  The  coma  which  in  some  cases 
precedes  parturition  had  been  mistaken  by  her 
friends  for  death.  Notwithstanding  his  passion, 
the  knight  treated  her  with  the  most  chivalrous 
deference.  And  when  Niccoluccio  Caccianimico, 
the  lady's  husband  (who  was  away),  returned, 
Gentil  invited  him  and  some  neighbours  to  a 
supper,  and  at  the  conclusion  of  the  feast — 
imitating  "  a  pretty  Persian  custom  "  he  had 
heard  of — introduced  to  Niccoluccio  Cacciani- 
mico, as  the  most  precious  possession  in  the 
house,  the  lady  and  her  son. 

From  the  time  of  Tuber ville's  "  Tragical 
Tales,"  published  in  1587,  and  the  drama  of 
"  How  to  Know  a  Good  Wife  from  a  Bad  One," 
published  in  1602,  down  to  the  publication  of 
Tennyson's  "  Lover's  Tale,"  this  story  has  been 
frequently  handled. 

On  comparing  these  variations  with  Boccac- 
cio's original,  we  perceive  that  the  great  and 
all-important  point  in  the  treatment  of  such  a 
subject  by  poet  or  novelist  is  to  take  care  that, 
as  the  heroine  is  to  be  used,  after  her  rescue, 
for  romantic  and  poetic  purposes,  the  memory 
of  the  sepulchre  shall  not  soil  her  beauty,  as  it 


140  POETRY 

soils  the  beauty  of  the  Mademoiselle  Laurence 
of  Heine's  prose  story  (another  variation,  by 
the  bye),  and  poison  it,  as  if 

The  conscious  Parcae  threw 
Upon  those  roseate  lips  a  Stygian  hue. 

Even  in  prose  fiction,  it  may  be  said  that  what- 
ever adventures  the  story-teller  may  record- 
however  terrible  and  dreadful  they  may  be- 
there  must  cling  to  the  hero  and  heroine  of  a 
love  story  no  memory  or  forecast  of  the  atmos- 
phere of  the  charnel-house.  But  when  the  love 
story  is  also  a  poem  the  charnel-house  must 
not  be  even  hinted  at.  The  "  deep  dishonour 
of  death  "  is  ineviable  to  all,  but,  as  the  present 
writer  has  said  elsewhere,  "it  is  insupportable, 

"  To  taste  the  fell  destroyer's  crowning  spite 
That  blasts  the  soul  with  life's  most  cruel  sight, 
Corruption's  hand  at  work  in  life's  transition." 

^  Poetry  cannot  live  apart  from  beauty — this  is 
now  so  recognised  a  truth  as  to  be  a  truism  ; 
and  though  Death,  even  as  a  "  cold  obstruc- 
tion," may,  as  we  so  clearly  see  in  "  Evelyn 
Hope,"  be  rendered  beautiful,  nothing  can  make 
beautiful  to  the  bereaved  soul  the  corruption  of 
the  tomb,  nothing  can  make  it  other  than  what 
it  is — a  dreadful  satire  upon  poetry  itself,  the 
saddest  and  the  grimmest  exhibition  of  man's 
fate,  which  the  poet,  whose  function  it  is  not 
to  "  hurt  "  (as  Joubert  puts  it),  but  to  soothe 
and  to  bless,  should  be  careful  to  leave  un- 
touched. 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      141 

Tennyson  has  not  curbed  his  imagination  at 
the  point  where  to  curb  it  was  so  necessary,  but 
paints  the  lover  kneeling  there, 

Down  in  the  dreadful  dust  that  once  was  man, 
Dust,  as  he  said,  that  once  was  loving  hearts. 

While  Boccaccio  rescues  his  heroine  as  quickly 
as  possible  from  the  contamination  of  the 
charnel-house,  merely  saying  that  the  lover, 
"  lying  down  beside  her,  put  his  cheek  to  hers 
and  wept." 

Conspicuous  as  the  story  of  Gentil  de  Cari- 
sendi  is  for  that  perfect  sweetness  of  style 
which  sets  Boccaccio  at  the  head  of  all  Western 
story-tellers,  it  is  scarcely  adapted  for  purely 
poetic  treatment.  For  if  the  charnel-house  is  a 
subject  unfit  for  the  poet,  how  much  more  so 
are  those  dreadful  stories  of  premature  inter- 
ment which  from  time  immemorial  have  been 
a  terror  and  a  fascination  for  the  human  mind  ? 

No  story  seems  fit  for  poetical  treatment  which 
can  call  up  even  by  suggestion  the  intolerable 
picture  of  a  poor  soul  waking  up  to  find  itself 
in  a  scene  such  as  that  depicted  in  Tennyson's 
poem — waking  up  as  this  lady,  our  imagination 
tells  us,  is  in  peril  of  doing,  amid  such  ghastly 
horrors,  shut  out  hopelessly  from  the  aid  and 
sympathy  of  man,  not  by  any  human  cruelty, 
but  by  some  awful  conjunction  of  fate  and 
circumstance  investing  man  for  the  time  being 
with  what  is  more  appalling  and  more  paralysing 
still — the  unconscious  cruelty  of  Nature's  blind 
forces. 

A  living  poet  of  distinction  has  fallen  into 


142  POETRY 

error  of  a  different  kind  in  selecting  another 
story  of  Boccaccio's,  that  of  the  story  of  "  Giro- 
lamo  and  Salvestra."  It  is  difficult  to  see  what 
poet  could  avoid  the  aesthetic  perils  surrounding 
the  situation  involved  in  a  lover  entering  the 
chamber  of  a  married  woman,  and  lying  by  her 
side,  with  her  husband  asleep  on  the  same  bed, 
and  eventually  dying  there.  "  A  full  and  con- 
scientious record  of  the  poetic  vision  "  would  be 
inadmissible.  Yet  a  conscientious  record  can 
only  be  avoided  by  such  a  false  and  mawkish 
pretence  of  rendering  as  must  have  been  most 
galling  to  the  poet. 

We  must  now  give  undivided  attention  to 
pure  egoistic  or  lyric  imagination.  This,  as  has 
been  said,  is  sufficient  to  vitalize  all  forms  of 
poetic  art  save  drama,  and  the  Greek  epic. 

The  Hebrew  poets  have  produced  a  lyric  so 
different  in  kind  from  all  other  lyrics  as  to 
stand  in  a  class  by  itself.  As  it  is  equal  in 
importance  to  the  Great  Drama  of  Shakes- 
peare, ^Eschylus,  and  Sophocles,  we  may  per- 
haps be  allowed  to  call  it  the  "  Great  Lyric." 
The  Great  Lyric  must  be  religious — it  must,  it 
would  seem,  be  an  outpouring  of  the  soul,  not 
towards  man,  but  towards  God,  like  that  of  the 
God-intoxicated  prophets  and  psalmists  of 
Scripture.  Even  the  lyric  fire  of  Pindar  owes 
much  to  the  fact  that  he  had  a  child-like  belief 
in  the  myths  to  which  so  many  of  his  contem- 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      143 

poraries  had  begun  to  give  a  languid  assent. 
But  there  is  nothing  in  Pindar,  or  indeed  else- 
where in  Greek  poetry  like  the  rapturous  song, 
which  we  have  called  the  great  lyric,  where 
alone  we  get  the  perfect  example  of  the  Great 
Style. 

But  what  is  the  Great  Style  ?  The  Great 
Style  is  far  more  easily  recognised  than 
defined.  To  define  any  kind  of  style,  indeed, 
we  must  turn  to  real  life.  When  we  say  of  an 
individual  in  real  life  that  he  or  she  has  style, 
we  mean  that  the  individual  gives  us  an  im- 
pression of  unconscious  power  or  unconscious 
grace,  as  distinguished  from  that  conscious 
power  or  conscious  grace  that  we  call  manner. 
It  is  the  same  in  literature  ;  style  is  unconscious 
power  or  grace — manner  is  conscious  power  or 
grace.  But  the  Great  Style,  both  in  literature 
and  in  life,  is  unconscious  power  and  uncon- 
scious grace  in  one. 

And  whither  must  we  turn  in  quest  of  this, 
as  the  natural  expresssion  of  a  national  temper  ? 
Not  to  the  Celt,  we  think,  as  Arnold  does.  Not, 
indeed,  to  those  whose  languages,  complex  of 
syntax  and  alive  with  self-conscious  inflections, 
bespeak  the  scientific  knowingness  of  the  Aryan 
mind — not,  certainly,  to  those  who,  though 
producing  ^Eschylus,  turned  into  Aphrodite  the 
great  Astarte  of  the  Syrians.  We  might,  per- 
haps say  that  there  were  those  in  Egypt  once 
who  came  near  to  the  great  ideal.  That  descrip- 
tion of  the  abode  of  "  Nin-ki-gal,"  the  Queen  of 


144  POETRY 

Death,  recently  deciphered  from  a  tablet  in  the 
British  Museum,  is  nearly  in  the  Great  Style, 
yet  not  quite.  Conscious  power  and  conscious 
grace  are  Hellenic,  of  course.  That  there  is  a 
deal  of  unconsciousness  in  Homer  is  true  ;  but, 
put  his  elaborate  comparisons  by  the  side  of  the 
fiery  metaphors  of  scenes  in  the  Bible,  and  how 
artificial  he  seems.  And  note  that,  afterwards, 
when  he  who  approached  nearest  to  the  Great 
Style  wrote  Prometheus  and  the  Furies,  Orienta- 
lism was  overflowing  Greece,  like  the  waters  of 
the  Nile.  It  is  to  the  Latin  races — some  of 
them — that  has  filtered  Hellenic  manner  ;  but 
whensoever,  as  in  Dante,  the  Great  Style  has 
been  caught  more  than  in  any  other  European 
writer,  it  conies  not  from  the  Hellenic  fountain 
but  straight  from  the  Hebrew.  What  the  Latin 
races  lack,  the  Teutonic  races  have — uncon- 
sciousness ;  often  unconscious  power,  but  often 
also  unconscious  brutaliU.  In  discussing  epic 
poetry  we  have  spoken  enthusiastically  of  the 
Northern  Epic,  the  Vdlsunga  Saga,  but  it  must 
be  remembered  that  sublime  as  is  the  Northern 
mythology,  it  is  often  dashed  with  what  can 
only  be  called  primeval  savagery  :  the  coarse 
grotesque  mingles  with  and  often  mars  its 
finest  effects.  Even  that  great  final  conflict 
which  we  have  described  in  our  remarks  upon 
the  Northern  epic — that  conflict  between  gods 
and  men  and  the  swarming  brood  of  evil  on  the 
plain  of  Wigrid,  foretold  by  the  Voluseeress, 
when  from  Yotunland  they  come  and  storm 
the  very  gates  of  Asgard — even  this  fine  combat 
ends  in  the  grotesque  picture  of  the  Fenrir-wol 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC  ART      145 

gulping  Odin  down  like  an  oyster,  and  digesting 
the  universe  to  chaos.  But,  out  of  the  twenty- 
three  thousand  and  more  verses  into  which  the 
Bible  has  been  divided,  no  one  can  find  a  vulgar 
verse  ;  for  the  Great  Style  allows  the  stylist  to 
touch  upon  any  subject  with  no  risk  of  defile- 
ment. This  is  why  style  in  literature  is  virtue. 
Like  royalty,  the  Great  Style  "  can  do  no 
wrong." 

But  then  it  will  be  said  that  the  English  Bible 
is  a  translation  from  a  foreign  tongue — a  tongue 
as  unlike  the  English  as  can  well  be.  Just  so, 
and  here  comes  the  most  interesting  fact  in  the 
history  of  all  literature,  and  one  upon  which  it 
is  absolutely  necessary  that  we  should  linger  over. 
Taine,  amidst  a  large  number  of  hypothetical 
generalizations  which  we  must  take  with  caution, 
sometimes  lights  upon  a  deeper  thing  than  has 
been  said  by  any  other  critic.  Among  these 
deep  generalizations  we  are  startled  by  the 
following,  which  explains  the  vast  superiority 
of  the  English  translation  of  the  Bible  over  all 
other  translations,  and  in  a  certain  deep  sense 
makes  it  an  original  work.  "  More  than  any 
race  in  Europe,"  he  says,  "  they  (the  British) 
approach  by  the  simplicity  and  energy  of  their 
conceptions  the  old  Hebraic  spirit.  Enthusiasm 
is  their  natural  condition,  and  their  Deity  fills 
them  with  admiration  as  their  ancient  deities 
inspired  them  with  fury." 

Of  Teutonic  graceless  unconsciousness,  the 
Anglo-Saxons  have  by  far  the  largest  endow- 
ment. They  wanted  another  element,  in  short, 
not  the  Hellenic  element ;  for  there  never  was  a 


146  POETRY 

greater  mistake  than  that  of  supposing  that 
Hellenism  can  be  engrafted  on  Teutonism  and 
live  ;  as  Landor  and  Arnold — two  of  the  finest 
minds  of  modern  times — have  testified  by  their 
failures. 

But,  long  before  the  memorable  Hampton 
Court  Conference ;  long  before  the  Bishop's 
Bible  or  Coverdale's  Bible  ;  long  before  even 
Aldhelm's  time — Hebraism  had  been  flowing 
over  and  enriching  the  Anglo-Saxon  mind. 
From  the  time  when  Casdmon,  the  forlorn  cow- 
herd, fell  asleep  beneath  the  stars  by  the  stable- 
door,  and  was  bidden  to  sing  the  Biblical  story, 
Anglo-Saxon  literature  grew  more  and  more 
Hebraic.  Yet,  in  a  certain  sense,  the  Hebraism 
in  which  the  English  mind  was  steeped  had  been 
Hebraism  at  second  hand — that  of  the  Vulgate 
mainly — till  Tyndale's  time,  or  rather  till  the 
present  Authorized  Version  of  the  Bible  appeared 
in  1611.  "There  is  no  book,"  says  Selden, 
"  so  translated  as  the  Bible  for  the  purpose. 
If  I  translate  a  French  book  into  English,  I 
turn  it  into  English  phrase,  not  into  French- 
English.  "II  fait  froid,"  I  say,  "'tis  cold,  not 
it  makes  cold  ;  but  the  Bible  is  rather  trans- 
lated into  English  words  than  into  English 
phrase.  The  Hebraisms  are  kept,  and  the 
phrase  of  that  language  is  kept." 

And  in  great  measure  this  is  true,  no  doubt  ; 
yet  literal  accuracy — importation  of  Hebraisms 
— was  not  of  itself  enough  to  produce  a  trans- 
lation in  the  Great  Style — a  translation  such  as 
this,  which,  as  Coleridge  says,  makes  us  think 
that  "  the  translators  themselves  were  inspired/' 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      147 

Taine's  deep  theory  is  required  to  explain  it. 
To  reproduce  the  Great  Style  of  the  original  in 
a  Western  idiom,  the  happiest  combination  of 
circumstances  was  necessary.  The  temper  of 
the  people  receiving  must,  notwithstanding  all 
differences  of  habitation  and  civilization,  be 
elementally  in  harmony  with  that  of  the  people 
giving  ;  that  is,  it  must  be  poetic  rather  than 
ratiocinative.  Society  must  not  be  too  com- 
plex— its  tone  must  not  be  too  knowing  and 
self -glorify  ing.  The  accepted  pyschology  of  the 
time  must  not  be  the  psychology  of  the  scalpel 
— the  metaphysics  must  not  be  the  metaphysics 
of  newspaper  cynicism  ;  above  all,  enthusiasm 
and  vulgarity  must  not  be  considered  synony- 
mous terms  ;  above  aJl  the  enthusiasm  mentioned 
by  Taine  is  necessary.  That  this  is  the  kind  of 
national  temper  necessary  to  such  a  work  might 
have  been  demonstrated  by  an  argument  a 
priori.  It  was  the  temper  of  the  English  nation 
when  the  Bible  was  translated.  That  noble 
heroism — born  of  faith  in  God  and  belief  in  the 
high  duties  of  man — which  we  have  lost  for  the 
hour — was  in  the  very  atmosphere  that  hung 
over  the  island.  And  style  in  real  life,  which 
now,  as  a  consequence  of  our  loss,  does  not 
exist  at  all  among  Englishmen,  having  given 
place  in  all  classes  to  manner — nourished  then 
in  all  its  charm.  And  in  literature  it  was  the 
same  ;  not  even  the  euphuism  imported  from 
the  Continent  could  really  destroy  or  even 
seriously  damage  the  then  national  sense  of 
style. 
Then,  as  to  the  form  of  literature  adopted  in 


148  POETRY 

the  translation,  what  must  that  be  ?  Evidently 
it  must  be  some  kind  of  form  which  can  do  all 
the  high  work  that  is  generally  left  to  metrical 
language,  and  yet  must  be  free  from  any  soup- 
£on  of  that  "  artifice  "  in  the  "  abandonment  " 
of  which,  says  an  Arabian  historian,  "  true  art 
alone  lies."  For,  this  is  most  noteworthy,  that 
of  literature  as  an  art,  the  Semites  show  but 
small  conception,  even  in  Job.  It  was  too 
sacred  for  that — drama  and  epic  in  the  Aryan 
sense  were  alike  unknown. 

But  if  the  translation  must  not  be  metrical 
in  the  common  acceptation  of  that  word, 
neither  must  it  be  prose  ;  we  will  not  say  logical 
prose  ;  for  all  prose,  however  high  may  be  its 
flights,  however  poetic  and  emotive,  must 
always  be  logical  underneath,  must  always  be 
chained  by  a  logical  chain,  and  earth-bound 
like  a  captive  balloon  ;  just  as  poetry,  on  the 
other  hand,  however  didactic  and  even  ratio- 
cinative  it  may  become,  must  always  be  steeped 
in  emotion.  It  must  be  neither  verse  nor  prose, 
it  seems.  It  must  be  a  new  movement  alto- 
gether. The  musical  movement  of  the  English 
Bible  is  a  now  movement ;  let  us  call  it  "  Bible 
Rhythm."  And  the  movement  was  devised 
thus  :  Difficulty  is  the  worker  of  modern  miracles. 
Thanks  to  Difficulty — thanks  to  the  conflict 
between  what  Selden  calls  "  Hebrew  phrase 
and  English  phrase,"  the  translators  fashioned, 
or  rather,  Difficulty  fashioned  for  them,  a  move- 
ment which  was  neither  one  nor  wholly  the 
other — a  movement  which,  for  naivete"  and 
pathos  in  the  narrative  portions,  for  music, 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      149 

variety,  splendour  and  sublimity,  in  the  purely 
lyrical  portions  is  above  all  the  effects  of  English 
poetic  art,  above  all  the  rhythms  and  all  the 
rhymes  of  the  modern  world — a  movement, 
indeed,  which  is  a  form  of  art  of  itself — but 
a  form  in  which  "  artifice  "  is  really  "  aban- 
doned "  at  last.  This  rhythm  it  is  that  runs 
through  the  English  Prayer-Book,  and  which 
governs  every  verse  of  the  Bible,  its  highest 
reaches  perhaps  being  in  the  Psalms.  Re- 
ferring to  what  has  been  previously  said  as  to 
the  fundamental  difference  between  structural 
poetry  and  prose  with  regard  to  expectation  of 
cadence,  the  great  features  of  Bible  Rhythm  are 
a  recognised  music  apart  from  a  recognised  law 
— "  Artifice  "  so  completely  abandoned  that 
we  forget  we  are  in  the  realm  of  art — pauses 
so  divinely  set  that  they  seem  to  be  "  wood- 
notes  wild,"  though  all  the  while  they  are,  and 
must  be,  governed  by  a  mysterious  law  too 
subtly  sweet  to  be  formulated  ;  and  all  kinds  of 
beauties  infinitely  beyond  the  triumphs  of  the 
metricist,  but  beauties  that  are  unexpected. 
There  is  a  metre,  to  be  sure,  but  it  is  that  of  the 
"  moving  music  which  is  life  "  ;  it  is  the  living 
metre  of  the  surging  sea  within  the  soul  of  him 
who  speaks ;  it  is  the  free  affluence  of  the 
emotions  and  the  passions  which  are  passing 
into  the  words.  And  if  this  is  so  in  other  parts 
of  the  Bible,  what  is  it  in  the  Great  Lyric, 
the  Psalms,  where  "the  flaming  steeds  of  song," 
though  really  kept  strongly  in  hand,  seem  to 
run  reinless  as  "  the  wild  horses  of  the  wind  ?  " 
And  it  is  this  which  compels  us  to  place  the 


150  POETRY 

English  Bible  at  the  top  of  English  Literature. 
A  great  savant  once  characterized  the  Bible  as 
"  a  collection  of  the  rude  imaginings  of  Syria," 
"the  worn-out  old  bottle  of  Judaism  into  which 
the  generous  new  wine  of  science  is  being 
poured."  The  great  savant  was  angry  when  he 
said  so.  The  "  new- wine "  of  science  is  a 
generous  vintage,  undoubtedly,  and  deserves  all 
the  respect  it  gets  from  us,  so  do  those  who 
make  it  and  serve  it  out ;  they  have  so  much 
intelligence ;  they  are  so  honest  and  so  fearless. 
But  whatever  may  become  of  their  wine  in  a 
few  years,  when  the  wine-dealers  shall  have 
passed  away,  when  the  savant  is  forgotten  as 
any  star-gazer  of  Chaldsea — the  "  old-bottle  "  is 
going  to  be  older  yet.  For  that  which  decides 
the  vitality  of  any  book  is  precisely  that  which 
decides  the  value  of  any  human  soul — not  the 
knowledge  it  contains,  but  simply  the  attitude 
it  assumes  towards  the  universe,  unseen  as  well 
as  seen.  The  attitude  of  the  Bible  is  just  that 
which  every  soul  must,  in  its  highest  and  truest 
moods  always  assume — that  of  a  wise  wonder 
and  a  noble  humility  in  front  of  such  a  universe 
as  this.  This  is  why — like  Alexander's  mirror — 
like  that  most  precious  "  Cup  of  Jemshid " 
imagined  by  the  Persians — the  Bible  reflects 
to-day,  and  will  reflect  for  ever,  every  wave  of 
human  emotion,  every  passing  event  of  human 
life — reflect  them  as  faithfully  as  it  did  to  the 
great  and  simple  people  in  whose  great  and 
simple  tongue  it  was  written.  Coming  from  the 
Vernunft  of  Man,  it  goes  straight  to  the  Vernunft. 
This  is  the  kind  of  literature  that  never  does  die. 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      151 

The  very  quintessence  of  the  Bible  is  the 
Book  of  the  Psalms.  Therefore  the  universal 
passion  for  Psalm-singing  is  not  wonderful ;  the 
wonder  is  that,  liking  so  much  to  sing,  they 
can  find  it  possible  to  sing  so  badly.  It  is  not 
wonderful  that  the  court  of  Francis  I.  should 
yearn  to  sing  Psalms  ;  the  wonderful  thing  is 
that  they  should  find  it  in  their  hearts  to  sing 
Marot's  Psalms  when  they  might  have  sung 
David's — that  Her  Majesty  the  Queen  could 
sing  to  a  fashionable  jig,  "  O  Lord,  rebuke  me 
not  in  thine  indignation  "  •  and  that  Anthony, 
King  of  Navarre,  could  sing  to  the  air  of  a 
dance  of  Poitou,  "  Stand  up,  O  Lord,  to  revenge 
my  quarrel."  For,  although  it  is  given  to  the 
very  frogs,  according  to  Pascal,  to  find  music  in 
their  own  croaking,  the  ears  that  can  find  music 
in  such  frogs  as  Marot  in  France,  in  England 
such  frogs  as  Brady  and  Tate,  and  in  Scotland 
such  frogs  as  Rous,  must  be  of  a  peculiar  con- 
volution. 

When  Macaulay's  tiresome  New  Zealander 
has  done  contemplating  the  ruins  on  London 
Bridge,  and  turned  into  the  deserted  British 
Museum  to  study  us  through  our  books — what 
volume  can  he  take  as  the  representative  one— 
what  book,  above  all  others,  can  the  ghostly 
librarian  select  to  give  him  the  truest,  the 
profoundest  insight  into  the  character  of  the 
strange  people  who  had  made  such  a  great 
figure  in  the  earth  ?  We,  for  our  part,  should 
not  hesitate  to  give  him  the  English  Book  of 
Common  Prayer,  with  the  authorised  version 
of  the  Psalms  at  the  end,  as  representing  the 


152  POETRY 

modern  British  mind  in  its  most  exalted  and 
its  most  abject  phases.  That  in  the  same 
volume  can  be  found  side  by  side  the  beauty 
and  pathos  of  the  English  Litany,  the  grandeur 
of  the  English  Version  of  the  Psalms  and  the 
effusions  of  Brady  and  Tate — masters  of  the 
art  of  singing,  compared  with  whom  Rous  is 
an  inspired  bard — would  be  adequate  evidence 
that  the  Church  using  it  must  be  a  British 
Church — that  British,  most  British,  must  be 
the  public  tolerating  it. 

"  By  thine  Agony  and  bloody  Sweat  ;  by  thy  Cross 
and  Passion ;  by  thy  precious  Death  and  Burial ;  by  thy 
glorious  Resurrection,  and  Ascension  ;  and  by  the  coming 
of  the  Holy  Ghost, 

Good  Lord,  deliver  us." 

Among  Western  peoples  there  is  but  one  that 
could  have  uttered  in  such  language  this  cry, 
where  pathos  and  sublimity  and  subtlest  music 
are  so  mysteriously  blended — blended  so  divinely 
that  the  man  who  can  utter  it,  familiar  as  it  is, 
without  an  emotion  deep  enough  to  touch  close 
upon  the  fount  of  tears  must  be  differently 
constituted  from  some  of  us.  Among  Western 
peoples  there  is,  we  say,  but  one  that  could 
have  done  this  ;  and  now  listen  to  this  : — 

When  we,  our  wearied  limbs  to  rest, 
Sat  down  by  proud  Euphrates'  stream, 

We  wept,  with  doleful  thoughts  opprest, 
And  Zion  was  our  mournful  theme. 

Among  all  the  peoples  of  the  earth  there  is 
but   one  -who  could  have  thus  degraded  the 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      153 

words  :  "  By  the  rivers  of  Babylon,  there  we 
sat  down,  yea,  we  wept  when  we  remembered 
Zion."  For,  to  achieve  such  platitude  there  is 
necessary  an  element  which  can  only  be  called 
the  "  Hopkins  element,"  an  element  which  is 
quite  an  insular  birthright  of  ours,  a  character- 
istic which  came  over  with  the  "  White  Horse  " 
— that  "  dull  coarseness  of  taste  "  which  dis- 
tinguishes the  British  mind  from  all  others ; 
that  "  achtbrittische  Beschranktheit "  which 
Heine  sneers  at.  The  Scottish  version  is  rough, 
but  Brady  and  Tate's  inanities  are  worse  than 
Rous's  roughness. 

Such  an  anomaly  as  this  in  one  and  the  same 
literature,  in  one  and  the  same  little  book,  is 
unnatural ;  it  is  monstrous ;  whence  can  it 
come  ?  It  is,  indeed,  singular  that  no  one  has 
ever  dreamed  of  taking  the  story  of  the  English 
Prayer-Book,  with  Brady  and  Tate  at  the  end, 
and  using  it  as  a  key  to  unlock  that  puzzle  of 
puzzles  which  has  set  the  Continental  critics 
writing  nonsense  about  the  English  for  genera- 
tions : — "  What  is  it  that  makes  the  enormous 
difference  between  English  literature — and  all 
other  Western  literatures — Teutonic  no  less  than 
Latin  or  Slavonic  ?  "  The  simple  truth  of  the 
matter  is,  that  the  British  mind  has  always 
been  bipartite  as  now — has  always  been,  as  now, 
half  sublime  and  half  homety  to  very  coarseness  ; 
in  other  words,  it  has  been  half  inspired  by 
David  King  of  Israel,  and  half  by  John  Hopkins, 
Suffolk  schoolmaster  and  archetype  of  prosaic 
bards,  who,  in  1562,  took  such  of  the  Psalms  as 
Sternhold  had  left  unsullied  and  doggerellized 


154  POETRY 

them.  For,  as  we  have  said,  Hopkins,  in  many 
and  various  incarnations,  has  been  singing 
unctuously  in  these  islands  ever  since  the  in- 
troduction of  Christianity,  and  before  ;  for  he 
is  Anglo-Saxon  tastelessness,  he  is  Anglo-Saxon 
deafness  to  music  and  blindness  to  beauty. 
When  St.  Augustine  landed  here  with  David  he 
found  not  only  Odin,  but  Hopkins,  a  heathen 
at  that  time  in  possession  of  the  soil. 

There  is,  therefore,  half  of  a  great  truth  in 
what  Taine  says.  The  English  have,  besides 
the  Hopkins  element,  which  is  indigenous,  much 
of  the  Hebraic  temper,  which  is  indigenous 
too ;  but  they  have  by  nature  none  of  the 
Hebraic  style.  But,  somehow,  here  is  the 
difference  between  us  and  the  Continentals  that, 
though  style  is  born  of  taste — though  le  style 
c'esl  la  race,  and  though  the  Anglo-Saxon 
started,  as  we  have  seen,  with  Odin  and  Hop- 
kins alone,  yet,  just  as  instinct  may  be  sown 
and  grown  by  ancestral  habit  of  many  years- 
just  as  the  pointer  puppy,  for  instance,  points 
he  knows  not  why,  because  his  ancestors  were 
taught  to  point  before  him — so  may  the  Hebraic 
style  be  sown  and  grown  in  a  foreign  soil  if  the 
soil  be  Anglo-Saxon,  and  if  the  seed-time  last 
for  a  thousand  years.  The  result  of  all  this  is, 
that  the  English,  notwithstanding  their  de- 
ficiency of  artistic  instinct  and  coarseness  of 
taste,  have  the  Great  Style,  not  only  in  poetry, 
sometimes,  but  in  prose  sometimes  when  they 
write  emotively,  as  we  see  in  the  English  Prayer 
Book,  in  parts  of  Raleigh's  "  History  of  the 
World,"  in  Jeremy  Taylor's  sermons,  in  Hall's 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      155 

"  Contemplations,"  and  other  such  books  of  the 
seventeenth  century. 

Yet  in  spite  of  this  there  is  not,  in  the  whole 
of  modern  history,  a  more  suggestive  subject 
than  that  of  the  persistent  attempts  of  every 
Western  literature  to  versify  the  Psalms  in  its 
own  idiom,  and  the  uniform  failure  of  these 
attempts.  At  the  time  that  Sternhold  was 
"  bringing "  the  Psalms  into  "  fine  English 
meter  "  for  Henry  the  Eighth  and  Edward  the 
Sixth,  continental  rhymers  were  busy  at  the 
same  kind  of  work  for  their  own  monarchs — 
notably  Clement  Marot  for  Francis  the  First. 
And  it  has  been  going  on  ever  since,  without  a 
single  protest  of  any  importance  having  been 
entered  against  it.  This  is  astonishing,  for  the 
Bible,  even  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  literary 
critic,  is  a  sacred  book. 

It  might  perhaps  be  said  indeed  that  the 
Great  Lyric  is  purely  Hebrew. 

But,  although  we  could  hardly  expect  to  find 
it  among  those  whose  language,  complex  of 
syntax  and  alive  with  self-conscious  inflexions, 
bespeaks  the  scientific  knowingness  of  the 
Western  mind,  to  call  the  temper  of  the  Great 
Lyric  broadly  "  Asiatic "  would  be  rash.  It 
seems  to  belong  as  a  birthright  to  those  des- 
cendants of  Shem  who,  yearning  always  to 
look  straight  into  the  face  of  God  and  live, 
could  (when  the  Great  Lyric  was  sung)  see  not 
much  else. 


156  POETRY 

Though  two  of  the  artistic  elements  of  the 
Great  Lyric,  unconsciousness  and  power,  are 
no  doubt  plentiful  enough  in  India,  the  element 
of  grace  is  lacking  for  the  most  part.  The 
Vedic  hymns  are  both  nebulous  and  unemo- 
tional, as  compared  with  Semitic  hymns.  And 
as  to  the  Persians,  they,  it  would  seem,  have 
the  grace  always,  the  power  often,  but  the 
unconsciousness  almost  never.  This  is  inevit- 
able if  we  consider  for  a  moment  the  chief 
characteristic  of  the  Persian  imagination — an 
imagination  whose  wings  are  not  so  much 
"  bright  with  beauty "  as  heavy  with  it- 
heavy  as  the  wings  of  a  golden  pheasant— 
steeped  in  beauty  like  the  "  tiger-moth's  deep 
damasked  wings."  New  beauty  of  this  kind  does 
not  go  to  the  making  of  the  Great  Lyric. 

Then  there  comes  that  poetry  which,  being 
ethnologically  Semitic,  might  be  supposed  to 
exhibit  something  at  least  of  the  Hebrew  temper 
— the  Arabian.  But,  whatever  may  be  said  of 
the  oldest  Arabic  poetry,  with  its  deep  sense  of 
fate  and  pain,  it  would  seem  that  nothing  can 
be  more  unlike  than  the  Hebrew  temper  and  the 
Arabian  temper  as  seen  in  later  poets.  It  is 
not  with  Hebrew,  but  with  Persian  poetry  that 
Arabian  poetry  can  be  usefully  compared.  If 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      157 

the  wings  of  the  Persian  imagination  are  heavy 
with  beauty,  those  of  the  later  Arabian  imagina- 
tion are  bright  with  beauty — brilliant  as  an 
Eastern  butterfly,  quick  and  agile  as  a  dragon- 
fly or  a  humming-bird.  To  the  eye  of  the 
Persian  poet  the  hues  of  earth  are  (as  Firdausi 
says  of  the  garden  of  Afrasiab)  "  like  the  tapestry 
of  the  kings  of  Ormuz,  the  air  is  perfumed  with 
musk,  and  the  waters  of  the  brooks  are  the 
essence  of  roses."  And  to  the  later  Arabian  no 
less  than  to  the  Persian  the  earth  is  beautiful  ; 
but  it  is  the  clear  and  sparkling  beauty  of  the 
earth  as  she  "  wakes  up  to  life,  greeting  the 
Sabaean  morning  "  ;  we  feel  the  light  more  than 
the  colour. 

But  it  is  neither  the  Persian's  instinct  for 
beauty,  nor  the  Arabian's  quenchless  wit  and 
exhaustless  animal  spirits  that  go  to  the  making 
of  the  Great  Lyric  ;  far  from  it.  In  a  word,  the 
Great  Lyric,  as  we  have  said,  cannot  be  assigned 
to  the  Asiatic  temper  generally  any  more  than 
it  can  be  assigned  to  the  European  temper. 

In  the  poetry  of  Europe,  if  we  cannot  say  of 
Pindar,  devout  as  he  is,  that  he  produced  the 
Great  Lyric,  what  can  we  say  of  any  other 
European  poet  ?  The  truth  is  that,  like  the 
Great  Drama,  so  straight  and  so  warm  does  it 


158  POETRY 

seem  to  come  from  the  heart  of  man  in  its 
highest  moods  that  we  scarcely  feel  it  to  be 
literature  at  all. 

Passing,  however,  from  this  supreme  ex- 
pression of  lyrical  imagination,  we  come  to  the 
artistic  ode.  Whatever  may  have  been  said 
to  the  contrary,  enthusiasm  is,  in  the  nature 
of  things,  the  very  basis  of  the  ode ;  for 
the  ode  is  a  mono-drama,  the  actor  in 
which  is  the  poet  himself ;  and,  as  Marmontel 
has  well  pointed  out,  if  the  actor  in  the  mono- 
drama  is  not  affected  by  the  sentiments  he 
expresses,  the  ode  must  be  cold  and  lifeless. 
But,  although  the  ode  is  a  natural  poetic  method 
of  the  poet  considered  as  prophet — although 
it  is  the  voice  of  poetry  as  a  fine  frenzy — it 
must  not  be  supposed  that  there  is  anything 
lawless  in  its  structure.  "  Pindar,"  says  the 
Italian  critic  Gravina,  "  launches  his  verses 
upon  the  bosom  of  the  sea,  he  spreads  out  all 
his  sails ;  he  confronts  the  tempest  and  the 
rocks ;  the  waves  arise  and  are  ready  to  engulf 
him ;  already  he  has  disappeared  from  the 
spectator's  view ;  when  suddenly  he  springs  up 
in  the  midst  of  the  waters,  and  reaches  happily 
the  shore." 

Now  it  is  this  Pindaric  discursiveness,  this 


VARIETIES   OF  POETIC   ART      159 

Pindaric  restraint  as  to  the  matter,  which  has 
led  poets  to  attempt  to  imitate  him  by  adopting 
an  unrestraint  as  to  form.  Although  no  two 
odes  of  Pindar  exhibit  the  same  metrical 
structure  (the  ^Eolian  and  Lydian  rhythms 
being  mingled  with  the  Doric  in  different 
proportions), .  yet  each  ode  is  in  itself  obedient, 
severely  obedient,  to  structural  law.  This  we 
feel ;  but  what  the  law  is  no  metricist  has  per- 
haps ever  yet  been  able  to  explain. 

It  was  a  strange  misconception  that  led 
people  for  centuries  to  use  the  word  "  Pindaric  " 
and  irregular  as  synonymous  terms  ;  whereas 
the  very  essence  of  the  odes  of  Pindar  (of  the 
few,  alas  !  which  survive  to  us)  is  their  regularity. 
There  is  no  more  difficult  form  of  poetry  than 
this,  and  for  this  reason ;  when  in  any  poetical 
composition  the  metres  are  varied,  there  must, 
as  the  present  writer  has  before  pointed  out, 
be  a  reason  for  such  freedom,  and  that  reason 
is  properly  subjective — the  varying  form  must 
embody  and  express  the  varying  emotions  of 
the  singer.  But  when  these  metrical  variations 
are  governed  by  no  subjective  law  at  all,  but  by 
arbitrary  rules  supposed  to  be  evolved  from  the 
practice  of  Pindar,  then  that  very  variety 
which  should  aid  the  poet  in  expressing  his 


i6o  POETRY 

emotion  crystallizes  it  and  makes  the  ode  the 
most  frigid  of  all  compositions.  Great  as  Pindar 
undoubtedly  is,  it  is  deeply  to  be  regretted  that 
no  other  poet  survives  to  represent  the  trium- 
phal ode  of  Greece, — the  digressions  of  his 
subject-matter  are  so  wide,  and  his  volubility 
is  so  great. 

In  modern  literature  the  ode  has  been  ruined 
by  theories  and  experiments.  A  poet  like 
La  Mothe,  for  instance,  writes  execrable  odes, 
and  then  writes  a  treatise  to  prove  that  all 
odes  should  be  written  on  the  same  model. 

There  is  much  confusion  of  mind  prevalent 
among  poets  as  to  what  is  and  what  is  not  an 
ode.  All  odes  are,  no  doubt,  divisible  into  two 
great  classes  :  those  which  following  an  arrange- 
ment in  stanzas,  are  commonly  called  regular, 
and  those  which,  following  no  such  arrange- 
ment, are  commonly  called  irregular. 

We  do  not  agree  with  those  who  assert  that 
irregular  metres  are  of  necessity  inimical  to 
poetic  art.  On  the  contrary,  we  believe  that  in 
modern  prosody  the  arrangement  of  the  rhymes 
and  the  length  of  the  lines  in  any  rhymed 
metrical  passage  may  be  determined  either  by 
a  fixed  stanzaic  law,  or  by  a  law  infinitely 
deeper — by  the  law  which  impels  the  soul,  in  a 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      161 

state  of  poetic  exultation,  to  seize  hold  of  every 
kind  of  metrical  aid,  such  as  rhyme,  caesura,  etc., 
for  the  purpose  of  accentuating  and  marking 
off  each  shade  of  emotion  as  it  arises,  regardless 
of  any  demands  of  stanza. 

But  between  the  irregularity  of  makeshift, 
such  as  we  find  it  in  Cowley  and  his  imitators, 
and  the  irregularity  of  the  "  fine  frenzy  "  of 
such  a  peom,  for  instance,  as  Coleridge's  Kubla 
Khan,  there  is  a  difference  in  kind.  Strange 
that  it  is  not  in  an  ode  at  all,  but  in  this  unique 
lyric  Kubla  Khan,  descriptive  of  imaginative 
landscape,  that  an  English  poet  has  at  last 
conquered  the  crowning  difficulty  of  writing  in 
irregular  metres.  Having  broken  away  from  all 
restraints  of  couplet  and  stanza — having  caused 
his  rhymes  and  pauses  to  fall  just  where  and 
just  when  the  emotion  demands  that  they 
should  fall,  scorning  the  exigencies  of  make- 
shift no  less  than  the  exigencies  of  stanza — 
he  has  found  that  every  writer  of  irregular 
English  odes  has  sought  in  vain  a  music  as 
entrancing,  as  natural,  and  at  the  same  time  as 
inscrutable  as  the  music  of  the  winds  or  of  the 
sea. 

The  prearranged  effects  of  sharp  contrasts 
and  antiphonal  movements,  such  as  some  poets 

M 


162  POETRY 

have  been  able  to  compass,  do  not,  of  course, 
come  under  the  present  definition  of  irregular 
metres  at  all.  If  a  metrical  passage  does  not 
gain  immensely  by  being  written  independently 
of  stanzaic  law,  it  loses  immensely  ;  and  for  this 
reason,  perhaps,  that  the  great  charm  of  the 
music  of  all  verse,  as  distinguished  from  the 
music  of  prose,  is  inevitableness  of  cadence. 
In  regular  metres  we  enjoy  the  pleasure  of 
feeling  that  the  rhymes  will  inevitably  fall  under 
a  recognized  law  of  couplet  or  stanza.  But  if 
the  passage  flows  independently  of  these,  it 
must  still  flow  inevitably — it  must,  in  short, 
show  that  it  is  governed  by  another  and  a  yet 
deeper  force,  the  inevitableness  of  emotional 
expression.  The  lines  must  be  long  or  short, 
the  rhymes  must  be  arranged  after  this  or  after 
that  interval,  not  because  it  is  convenient  so  to 
arrange  them,  but  because  the  emotion  of  the 
poet  inexorably  demands  these  and  no  other 
arrangements.  When,  however,  Coleridge  came 
to  try  his  hand  at  irregular  odes  such  as  the 
odes  "  To  the  Departing  Year  "  and  "  To  the 
Duchess  of  Devonshire,"  he  certainly  did  not 
succeed. 

As   to   Wordsworth's   magnificent   "  Ode  on 
Intimations  of  Immortality,"  the  sole  impeach- 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      163 

ment  of  it,  but  it  is  a  grave  one,  is  that  the 
length  of  the  lines  and  the  arrangement  of  the 
rhymes  are  not  always  inevitable  ;  they  are, 
except  on  rare  occasions,  governed  neither  by 
stanzaic  nor  by  emotional  law.  For  instance, 
what  emotional  necessity  was  there  for  the 
following  rhyme-arrangement  ? 

"  My  heart  is  at  your  festival, 
My  head  hath  its  coronal, 
The  fulness  of  your  bliss  I  feel — I  feel  it  all. 
Oh,  evil  day  1  if  I  were  sullen 
While  earth  herself  is  adorning, 
This  sweet  May  morning ; 
And  the  children  are  culling, 

on  every  side, 

In  a  thousand  valleys  far  and  wide, 
Fresh  flowers." 

Beautiful  as  is  the  substance  of  this  entire 
passage,  so  far  from  gaining,  it  loses  by  rhyme 
— loses,  not  in  perspicuity,  for  Wordsworth  like 
all  his  contemporaries  (except  Shelley)  is  mostly 
perspicuous,  but  in  that  metrical  emphasis  the 
quest  of  which  is  one  of  the  impulses  that  leads 
a  poet  to  write  in  rhyme.  In  spite,  however, 
of  its  metrical  defects,  this  famous  ode  of  Words- 
worth's is  the  finest  irregular  ode  in  the  language, 
for,  although  Coleridge's  "  Ode  to  the  Departing 
Year,"  excels  it  in  Pindaric  fire  it  is  below 
Wordsworth's  masterpiece  in  almost  every  other 


164  POETRY 

quality  save  rhythm.  Among  the  writers  of 
English  irregular  odes,  next  to  Wordsworth, 
stands  Dry  den.  The  second  stanza  of  the  "  Ode 
for  St.  Cecilia's  day  "  is  a  great  triumph. 

Leaving  the  irregular  and  turning  to  the 
regular  ode,  it  is  natural  to  divide  these  into 
two  classes  : — (i)  those  which  are  really  Pin- 
daric in  so  far  as  they  consist  of  strophes, 
antistrophes,  and  epodes,  variously  arranged 
and  contrasted  ;  and  (2)  those  which  consist  of 
a  regular  succession  of  regular  stanzas.  Per- 
haps all  Pindaric  odes  tend  to  show  that  this 
form  of  art  is  in  English  a  mistake.  It  is  easy 
enough  to  write  one  stanza  and  call  it  a  strophe, 
another  in  a  different  movement  and  call  it  an 
antistrophe,  a  third  in  a  different  movement 
still,  and  call  it  an  epode.  But  in  modern 
prosody,  disconnected  as  it  is  from  musical 
and  from  terpsichorean  science,  what  are  these  ? 
No  poet  and  no  critic  can  say. 

What  is  requisite  is  that  the  ear  of  the  reader 
should  catch  a  great  metrical  scheme,  of  which 
these  three  varieties  of  movement  are  necessary 
parts, — should  catch,  in  short,  that  inevitable- 
ness  of  structure  upon  which  we  have  already 
touched.  In  order  to  justify  a  poet  in  writing 
a  poem  in  three  different  kinds  of  movement 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      165 

governed  by  no  musical  and  no  terpsichorean 
necessity,  a  necessity  of  another  kind  should 
make  itself  apparent ;  that  is,  the  metrical  wave 
moving  in  the  strophe  should  be  metrically 
answered  by  the  counter  wave  moving  in  the 
antistrophe,  while  the  epode — which,  as  origin- 
ally conceived  by  Stesichorus,  was  merely  a 
standing  still  after  the  balanced  movements  of 
the  strophe  and  antistrophe — should  clearly,  in 
a  language  like  ours,  be  a  blended  echo  of  these 
two. 

A  mere  metrical  contrast  such  as  some  poets 
labour  to  effect  is  not  a  metrical  answer.  And 
if  the  reply  to  this  criticism  be  that  in  Pindar 
himself  no  such  metrical  scheme  is  apparent, 
that  is  the  strongest  possible  argument  in 
support  of  our  position.  If  indeed  the  metrical 
scheme  of  Pindar  is  not  apparent,  that  is 
because,  having  been  written  for  chanting,  it 
was  subordinate  to  the  lost  musical  scheme  of 
the  musician.  It  has  been  contended  and  is 
likely  enough,  that  this  musical  scheme  was 
simple — as  simple,  perhaps,  as  the  scheme  of  a 
cathedral  chant ;  but  to  it,  whatever  it  was, 
the  metrical  scheme  of  the  poet  was  subor- 
dinated. It  need  scarcely  be  said  that  the 
phrase  "  metrical  scheme  "  is  used  here  not  in 


166  POETRY 

the  narrow  sense  as  indicating  the  position  and 
movement  of  strophe  and  antistrophe  by  way  of 
simple  contrast,  but  in  the  deep  metrical  sense 
as  indicating  the  value  of  each  of  these  com- 
ponent parts  of  the  ode,  as  a  counter-wave 
balancing  and  explaining  the  other  waves  in 
the  harmony  of  the  entire  composition. 

We  touch  upon  this  matter  in  order  to  show 
that  the  moment  odes  ceased  to  be  chanted, 
the  words  strophe,  antistrophe,  and  epode  lost 
the  musical  value  they  had  among  the  Greeks, 
and  pretended  to  a  complex  metrical  value, 
which  their  actual  metrical  structure  does  not 
appear  to  justify.  It  does  not  follow  from  this 
that  odes  should  not  be  so  arranged,  but  it 
does  follow  that  the  poet's  arrangement  should 
justify  itself  by  disclosing  an  entire  metrical 
scheme  in  place  of  the  musical  scheme  to  which 
the  Greek  choral  lyric  was  evidently  sub- 
ordinated. But  even  if  the  poet  were  a  suffi- 
ciently skilled  metricist  to  compass  a  scheme 
embracing  a  wave,  an  answering  wave,  and  an 
echo  gathering  up  the  tones  of  each,  i.e.,  the 
strophe,  the  antistrophe,  and  the  epode,  the  ear 
of  the  reader,  unaided  by  the  musical  emphasis 
which  supported  the  rhythms  of  the  old  choral 
lyric,  is,  it  should  seem,  incapable  of  gathering 


VARIETIES  OF  POETIC  ART  167 
up  and  remembering  the  sounds  further  than 
the  strophe  and  the  antistrophe,  after  which  it 
demands  not  an  epode,  but  a  return  to  the 
strophe.  That  is  to  say,  an  epode,  as  alter- 
nating in  the  body  of  the  modern  ode,  is  a 
mistake ;  a  single  epode  at  the  end  of  a  group 
of  strophes  and  antistrophes  (as  in  some  of  the 
Greek  odes)  has,  of  course,  a  different  function 
altogether. 

The  great  difficulty  of  the  English  ode  is  that 
of  preventing  the  apparent  spontaneity  of  the 
impulse  from  being  marred  by  the  apparent 
artifice  of  the  form  ;  for,  assuredly,  no  writer 
subsequent  to  Coleridge  and  to  Keats  would 
dream  of  writing  an  ode  on  the  cold  Horatian 
principles  adopted  by  Warton,  and  even  by 
Collins,  in  his  beautiful  "  Ode  to  Evening." 

Of  the  second  kind  of  regular  odes,  those 
consisting  of  a  regular  succession  of  regular 
stanzas,  the  so-called  odes  of  Sappho  are,  of 
course,  so  transcendent  that  no  other  amatory 
lyrics  can  be  compared  with  them.  Never 
before  these  songs  were  sung,  and  never  since 
did  the  human  soul,  in  the  grip  of  a  fiery  passion 
utter  a  cry  like  hers ;  and,  from  the  executive 
point  of  view,  in  directness,  in  lucidity,  in  that 
high  imperious  verbal  economy  which  only 


168  POETRY 

Nature  herself  can  teach  the  artist,  she  has  no 
equal,  and  none  worthy  to  take  the  place  of 
second — not  even  in  Heine,  not  even  in  Burns. 
Turning,  however,  to  modern  poetry,  there  are 
some  magnificent  examples  of  this  simple  form 
of  ode  in  English  poetry — Spenser's  immortal 
"  Epithalamion  "  leading  the  way  in  point  of 
time,  and  probably  also  in  point  of  excellence. 

Fervour  being  absolutely  essential,  we  think, 
to  a  great  English  ode,  fluidity  of  metrical 
movement  can  never  be  dispensed  with.  The 
more  billowy  the  metrical  waves  the  better 
suited  are  they  to  render  the  emotions  expressed 
by  the  ode,  as  the  reader  will  see  by  referring 
to  Coleridge's  "  Ode  to  France  "  (the  finest  ode 
in  the  English  language,  according  to  Shelley), 
and  giving  special  attention  to  the  first  stanza— 
to  the  way  in  which  the  first  metrical  wave, 
after  it  had  gently  fallen  at  the  end  of  the  first 
quatrain,  leaps  up  again  on  the  double  rhymes 
(which  are  expressly  introduced  for  this  effect), 
and  goes  bounding  on,  billow  after  billow,  to 
the  end  of  the  stanza. 

Not  that  this  fine  ode  is  quite  free  from  the 
great  vice  of  the  English  ode,  rhetoric.  If  we 
except  Spenser,  and,  in  one  instance,  Collins, 
it  can  hardly  be  said  that  any  English  writer 


VARIETIES   OF   POETIC   ART      169 

before  Shelley  and  Keats  produced  odes  in- 
dependent of  rhetoric  and  supported  by  pure 
poetry  alone.  But  fervid  as  are  Shelley's  "  Ode 
to  the  West  Wind,"  and  Keats's  Odes  "  To  a 
Nightingale  "  and  "  On  a  Grecian  Urn,"  they 
are  entirely  free  from  rhetorical  flavour.  Not- 
withstanding that  in  the  "  Ode  on  a  Grecian 
Urn  "  the  first  stanza  does  not  match  in  rhyme 
arrangement  with  the  others,  while  the  second 
stanza  of  the  "  Ode  to  a  Nightingale  "  varies 
from  the  rest  by  running  on  four  rhyme-sounds 
instead  of  five,  vexing  the  ear  at  first  by  dis- 
appointed expectation,  these  two  odes  are,  after 
Coleridge's  "  France,"  the  finest  regular  odes 
perhaps  in  the  English  language. 

With  regard  to  the  French  ode,  Malherbe 
was  the  first  writer  who  brought  it  to  perfection. 
Malherbe  showed  also  more  variety  of  mood 
than  it  is  the  fashion  just  now  to  credit  him 
with.  This  may  be  specially  noted  in  his  "  Ode 
to  Louis  XIII."  His  disciple  Racan  is  not  of 
much  account.  There  is  certainly  much  vigour 
in  the  odes  of  Rousseau,  but  it  is  not  till  we 
reach  Victor  Hugo  that  we  realize  what  French 
poetry  can  achieve  in  this  line  ;  and  contem- 
porary poetry  can  hardly  be  examined  here. 
We  may  say,  however,  that  some  of  Hugo's 


i;o  POETRY 

odes  are  truly  magnificent.  As  a  pure  lyrist 
his  place  among  the  greatest  poets  of  the  world 
is  very  high.  Here,  though  writing  in  an 
inferior  language,  he  ranks  with  the  greatest 
masters  of  Greece,  of  England,  and  of  Germany. 
Had  he  attempted  no  other  kind  of  poetry  than 
lyrical  his  would  still  have  been  the  first  name 
in  French  poetry.  Whatever  is  defective  in 
his  work  arises,  as  in  the  case  of  Euripides  from 
the  importation  of  lyrical  force  where  dramatic 
force  is  mainly  needed. 


VI 
THE    SONNET 

IN  poetic  art  the  sonnet — a  stanza  mostly 
iambic  in  movement,  properly  decasyl- 
labic or  hen-decasyllabic  in  metre,  always 
in  fourteen  lines  arranged  properly  accor- 
ding to  some  law  that  is  recognised  at  once  as 
having  universal  acceptance — belongs  entirely 
to  the  rhymed  poetry  of  the  modern  world. 

Sonnets  are  divided  into  regular  and  irregular. 
All  regular  sonnets  are  divisible  into  :  (i)  The 
sonnet  of  simple  stanza  in  which  the  staves 
follow  each  other  in  three  quatrains  of  alternate 
rhymes  clinched  at  last  by  a  couplet.  This 
form  is  for  obvious  reasons  called  the  Shakes- 
pearean sonnet.  (2)  The  sonnet  of  compound 
stanza  divided  generally,  but  not  always,  both 
as  regards  sense-rhythm  and  metre-rhythm, 
into  two  parts — an  octave  consisting  of  eight 
lines  (the  first  line  of  which  rhymes  with  the 
fourth,  the  fifth,  and  the  eighth  lines,  the  second 
line  with  the  third,  the  sixth,  and  the  seventh), 

171 


172  POETRY 

and  a  sestet  consisting  of  six  lines  running  on 
two  or  else  three  rhymes  in  an  arrangement 
which,  though  free  from  prescription,  must 
always  act  as  a  response  by  way  of  either  ebb 
or  flow  to  the  metrical  billow  embodied  in  the 
octave.  This  form  is  for  equally  obvious 
reasons  called  Petrarchan. 

Though  poetic  art  has  many  functions  and 
many  methods,  the  two  following  among  its 
functions  seem  specially  to  concern  us  in  treat- 
ing of  the  sonnet  :  The  function  of  giving 
spontaneous  voice  to  the  emotions  and  passions 
of  the  poet's  soul :  and  the  function  of  poetising 
didactic  matter  and  bringing  it  into  poetic  art. 

With  regard  to  the  first  of  these  functions, 
although  the  sonnet  is  a  good  medium  for  ex- 
pressing passion  and  emotion,  it  cannot  be  said 
to  take  precedence  in  this  respect  of  other  and 
less  inherently  monumental  forms.  The  ode  of 
Sappho,  the  bird-like  song  of  Catullus,  and  the 
free-moving  rhymed  lyric  of  modern  times  are 
probably  better  adapted  to  give  expression  to 
simple  passion  at  white  heat — while  on  the 
other  hand  they  are  certainly  better  adapted 
to  give  voice  to  that  less  intense  form  of  passion 
which  can  pause  to  deck  itself  with  the  flowers 
of  a  beautiful  fancy — than  is  the  sonnet — 


THE   SONNET  173 

the  sonnet  of  simple  stanza  of  Shakes- 
peare and  Dray  ton.  With  regard,  however,  to 
the  second  of  the  above-mentioned  functions  of 
the  poet — that  of  poetising  didactic  matter — a 
function  which  of  course  can  only  be  exercised 
by  passing  the  didactic  matter  through  a 
laboratory  as  creative  and  as  recreative  as 
nature's  own,  the  laboratory  of  a  true  poet's 
imagination,  the  pure  lyric  must  of  course 
yield  to  the  sonnet.  Indeed,  it  is  an  open 
question  whether  since  the  Romantic  revival 
the  sonnet  has  not  been  gradually  taking  pre- 
cedence of  most  other  forms  as  an  embodiment 
of  poetised  didactics.  And  should  this  on 
inquiry  be  found  to  be  the  case,  the  importance 
of  this  form  will  be  made  manifest.  For  as  the 
mind  of  man  widens  in  mere  knowledge  and 
intelligence  fresh  prose  material  is  being  fur- 
nished for  the  poetic  laboratory  every  day. 
And  the  question,  What  is  the  poetic  form  best 
suited  to  embody  and  secure  this  ever-in- 
creasing and  ever-varying  wealth  ? — a  question 
which  has  to  be  answered  by  each  literature, 
and  indeed  by  each  period  of  each  literature, 
for  itself — goes  to  the  root  of  poetic  criticism. 
Of  course,  before  didactic  matter  can  become 
anything  more  than  versified  prose,  it  has  to  be 


I74  POETRY 

excarnated  from  the  prose  tissue  in  which  all 
such  matter  takes  birth,  and  then  incarnated 
anew  in  the  spiritualised  tissue  of  which  the 
poetic  body  is  and  must  always  be  composed. 
Hence  it  is  not  enough  for  the  poet  to  use  the 
sieve,  '  as  Dante  would  say,  '  in  selecting 
'  noble  words.'  The  best  prose  writers  from 
Plato  downwards  have  been  in  the  habit  of 
doing  this.  When  Waller  said  : 

Things  of  deep  sense  we  may  in  prose  unfold, 
But  they  move  more  in  lofty  numbers  told. 

he  meant  by  '  lofty  numbers  '  those  semi-poetic 
1  numbers '  of  the  English  couplet  in  which 
poetised  didactics  were  in  his  time  embodied — 
as  in  the  time  of  Shakespeare  such  poetised 
secretions  of  the  mere  intellectus  cogitabundus 
were  put  into  the  mouths  of  dramatic  characters 
after  the  approved  old  fashion  of  the  classical 
dramatists. 

Since  the  Romantic  revival,  however,  poetic 
art  has  undergone  an  entire  change.  Acted 
drama  cannot  now  receive  poetised  didactics, 
which  would  in  these  days  slacken  the  move- 
ment and  disturb  the  illusion  required,  while 
as  to  the  kind  of  epigram-in-solution  or  half- 
poetised  quintessential  prose  which  is  embodied 


THE    SONNET  175 

in  the  18th-century  couplet  the  criticism  of  the 
Romantic  revival  is  apt  to  consider  this  not  so 
much  as  poetry  as  an  intermediate  form — 
and  an  extremely  rich  and  precious  one — 
between  poetry  and  prose.  Epigrammatic 
matter  must,  to  exist  at  all,  be  knowing,  and  as 
knowingness  and  romanticism  are  mutually 
destructive,  it  is  evident  that  some  form  other 
than  the  couplet,  which  is  so  associated  with 
epigram,  must  in  our  time  be  used  for  the 
poetising  of  didactic  matter  of  the  unworldly 
and  lofty  kind.  And  the  sonnet  of  octave  and 
sestet  is  a  form  less  epigrammatic  than  any 
other — a  form  moreover  which  can  never,  as 
certain  other  stanzaic  forms  can  do,  embody 
mere  quintessential  prose  without  proclaiming 
its  poverty,  but  must  always  be  poetic  in  its  very 
texture — a  form  indeed  which  will  not  bear 
one  line  that  is  not  either  in  essence  or  in 
method  poetic  or  else  '  rhetorical '  in  Dante's 
sense  when  he  denned  poetry  to  be  '  a  rhetorical 
composition  set  to  music.'  So  absolutely  poetic 
a  form  is  this  that  if  it  should  happen  that 
the  diction  will  not  on  account  of  the  subject 
bear  elevation,  it  has  to  be  at  once  poetised  by 
one  of  those  skilful  disturbances  of  the  prose 
order  of  the  words  of  which  Wordsworth  was 
so  great  a  master. 


176  POETRY 

The  fact  of  the  word  sonnet  being  connected 
with  suonare,  to  play  upon  an  instrument, 
shows  that  a  knowledge  of  music,  though  per- 
haps not  essential,  is  of  great  value  to  a  sonnet- 
writer.  Indeed,  owing  to  the  consonantal 
character  of  our  language  a  knowledge  of  music 
is  really  of  more  importance  to  the  English 
than  to  the  Italian  sonnet- writer.  Although  the 
'  singing  words  '  essential  to  a  good  song  for 
music  need  not  perhaps  be  greatly  sought  in 
the  sonnet  (save  in  the  special  and  somewhat 
rare  form  mentioned  further  on),  still  vowel- 
composition  and  that  attention  to  sibilants 
which  Pindar  is  constantly  showing  in  his  odes 
—that  attention  which  Dionysius  of  Halicarn- 
assus  extolled — and  also  the  softening  of  con- 
sonantal feet  by  liquids  are  extremely  im- 
portant in  the  sonnet,  even  although  it  is  no 
longer  written  to  be  set  to  music.  After  much 
practice  in  the  art  of  rhymed  poetry — when 
every  feasible  rhyme  leaps  into  the  brain  of 
the  poet  the  moment  that  a  line-ending  has 
suggested  itself  to  his  mind — this  attention  to 
structural  demands  becomes  instinctive,  and  is 
exercised  in  that  half  unconscious  and  rapid 
evolution  of  the  mental  processes  which  the 
witty  conversationist  shows  in  repartee,  and 


THE    SONNET  177 

which  the  pianist  exhibits  when  touching  the 
key-board — supposing,  of  course,  that  the  poet 
is  a  born  rhymer.  It  is,  however,  a  curious  and 
interesting  fact  that  ever  since  the  time  of 
Piers  Plowman  (when  alliterative  measures  gave 
way  to  rhymed  measures)  English  poets  have 
been  clearly  divisible  into  two  classes — those  to 
whom  rhyme  is  an  aid,  and  those  to  whom 
rhyme  is  more  or  less  a  check.  And  still  more 
curious  and  interesting  is  it,  that  while  three 
of  the  greatest  poets,  Shakespeare,  Marlowe, 
and  Milton,  belong  to  the  one  class,  Coleridge 
(who  by  endowment  perhaps  stands  next  to 
them)  belongs  to  the  other.  This  is  why  some 
of  the  strongest  English  poets  have  not  been 
successful  in  the  sonnet,  where  the  rhyme- 
demands  are  very  great.  For  some  reason  or 
another  the  rhythmic  impulse  within  them  has 
not  been  stimulated,  but  crippled  and  tortured 
by  the  spur  of  rhyme. 

With  regard  to  prescription  in  the  number  of 
the  lines  and  the  arrangement  of  the  rhymes 
of  the  sonnet,  metrical  art  offers  the  reader  two 
opposite  kinds  of  pleasure  ;  the  pleasure  derived 
from  a  sense  of  prescribed  form,  as  in  the  sonnet, 
the  ballade,  the  rispetto,  the  stornello,  etc.,  and 
the  pleasure  derived  from  a  sense  of  freedom 

N 


178  POETRY 

from  prescribed  form  as  afforded  by  those  pure 
lyrics,  in  which  the  form  is,  or  at  least  should 
be,  governed  by  the  emotion.  Now  every 
poetical  composition  should  show  at  once  which 
of  these  kinds  of  pleasure  is  being  offered  to  the 
reader,  and  should  also  satisfy  the  expectation 
raised,  for  he  will  experience  a  sense  of  dis- 
appointment on  being  proffered  one  kind  of 
poetic  pleasure  when  he  has  been  led,  by  the 
stanzaic  arrangement  or  otherwise,  to  expect 
another.  Nevertheless,  a  certain  few  of  our 
great  sonnets  are  irregular,  for  a  great  poet  can 
do  anything. 

With  reference  to  regular  sonnets  it  is  self- 
evident,  as  regards  the  sonnet  of  compound 
stanza,  that  there  are  four  different  forms  into 
which  may  fall  a  metrical  structure  consisting 
of  an  octave  of  a  prescriptive  arrangement  of 
rhymes  and  a  sestet  consisting  of  another  set  of 
rhymes  that  are  free  in  arrangement  from 
prescription.  And  some  years  ago  the  present 
writer  exemplified  these  in  '  four  sonnets  on  the 
sonnet/  one  only  of  which  under  the  name  of 
'  The  Sonnet's  Voice,'  originally  printed  in  the 
Athenceum,  was  widely  circulated  in  sonnet- 
anthologies.  These  varieties  of  the  sonnet  of 
octave  and  sestet  are  :  (i)  The  sonnet  in  which 


THE   SONNET  179 

the  stronger  portion  both  in  rhythm  and  in 
substance  is  embodied  in  the  sestet.  (2)  The 
sonnet  in  which  the  stronger  portion  both  in 
rhythm  and  in  substance  is  embodied  in  the 
octave.  (3)  The  sonnet  in  which  the  sestet  is 
not  separated  from  the  octave,  but  seems  to  be 
merely  a  portion  of  the  octave's  movement 
rising  to  a  close  more  or  less  climacteric.  (4) 
The  sonnet  in  which  the  sestet  seems  to  be  added 
to  the  octave's  movement,  added  after  its 
apparent  termination  in  a  kind  of  tailpiece, 
answering  to  what  in  music  we  call  the  '  coda.' 
With  regard  to  the  second  of  these  varieties 
— the  one  exemplified  in  '  The  Sonnet's  Voice ' 
— perhaps  the  ideal  form  has  the  octave  in 
double  rhymes,  and  the  sestet  in  single  rhymes. 
But  it  has  to  be  remembered  by  the  poet  that 
between  the  effect  of  Italian  rhymes  and  the 
effect  of  English  double  rhymes  there  is  a  great 
difference.  Save  in  the  hands  of  a  sonnet-writer 
of  great  practice  in  the  art  of  vowel-composition, 
in  the  art  of  using  singing  words,  and  in  the  art 
of  softening  our  consonantal  language,  by  the 
proper  use  of  liquids  and  subtle  and  concealed 
alliterations,  the  English  rhyme-beat  in  the 
double-rhyme  octave  of  this  variety  is  apt  to 
become  too  heavy  for  the  single-rhyme  rhyme- 


i8o  POETRY 

beat  in  the  sestet.  By  attention  to  these  re- 
quirements, however,  the  rhyme-beat  may  be 
so  lightened  that  this  variety  may  become  the 
most  brilliant  of  all. 

With  regard  to  the  sonnet  of  simple  stanza, 
it  has  two  special  glories  :  it  was  the  form 
adopted  by  Shakespeare,  and  in  it  is  written 
Dray  ton's  famous  love-sonnet.  Hartley  Cole- 
ridge wrote  some  fine  sonnets  in  this  form ;  so 
did  Keats ;  but  on  the  whole  it  has  been  neg- 
lected in  recent  times.  A  renewed  attention  has, 
however,  been  lately  given  to  it  by  critics  of 
the  sonnet  both  in  England  and  America  owing 
to  Dr.  Gordon  Hake's  book  of  nature  poems, 
The  New  Day,  where  the  Shakespearean  form  of 
sonnet  is  used.  Here,  by  a  free  use  of  double 
rhymes  the  poet  gives  a  lyrical  movement  to 
his  verse,  which,  though  an  occasional  feature 
of  Shakespeare's  sonnets,  is  not  a  characteristic 
one. 

So  flexible  is  the  sonnet  that  every  sonnet- 
writer  can  and  does  put  into  his  work  the 
rhythmic  movement  natural  to  his  own  ear. 
The  fact  is  that,  although  in  a  language  like 
the  English,  it  requires  no  doubt  considerable 
ingenuity  to  construct  a  satisfactory  sonnet 
running  upon  two  rhymes  in  the  octave  and 
two  or  three  in  the  sestet,  the  sonnet  does  not 
really  belong  to  the  poetry  of  ingenuity.  Its 


THE    SONNET  181 

ingenuity  of  structure  is  only  a  means  to  an 
end,  the  end  being  that  a  single  wave  of  emotion, 
when  emotion  is  either  too  deeply  charged  with 
thought  or  too  much  adulterated  with  fancy  to 
pass  spontaneously  into  the  movements  of  pure 
lyric,  shall  be  embodied  in  a  single  metrical 
flow  and  return.  Hence  the  variety  of  rhythm 
in  the  sonnet  is  infinite. 

The  movement  of  Milton,  the  movement  of 
Wordsworth,  the  movement  of  Keats,  the 
movement  of  Mrs.  Browning,  the  movement  of 
Rossetti,  the  movement  of  Swinburne — the 
reader  knows  them  all.  Between  a  sonnet  of 
Tennyson's  and  a  sonnet  of  Rossetti's  so  vast 
is  the  difference  as  regards  rhythmic  emphasis 
that  it  is  difficult  to  realize  that  the  rhyme 
structure  is  the  same  in  the  one  as  in  the  other. 
And  the  same  remark  applies,  though  not  in  an 
equal  degree,  to  Italian  sonnets,  in  regard  to 
Dante,  Petrarch,  and  others. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  Keats  pro- 
duced more  than  one  supremely  fine  sonnet  of 
octave  and  sestet.  No  doubt  the  sonnet  '  On 
first  looking  into  Chapman's  Homer '  is,  if  not 
the  finest  sonnet  in  the  language,  very  nearly 
so,  and  can  only  yield  to  one  or  two  of  Words- 
worth's or  Rossetti's  best.  This  appeared  in 
Keats' s  first  volume  :  the  critics  who  failed  to 
see  from  it  what  a  future  lay  before  the  poet 
simply  proclaimed  their  own  ineptitude  or  their 
own  malignity.  But  in  all  Keats's  other  sonnets 
of  the  Petrarchan  type  there  are  those  signs  of 
hasty  and  incomplete  work  which  compelled 
Rossetti  to  characterize  them  as  "  first  drafts." 


i82  POETRY 

The  sonnets  on  the  Shakespearean  model  are 
some  of  them  better,  and  the  one  upon  Homer 
in  this  latter  form  is,  beyond  doubt,  very  fine. 

But  to  place  in  the  front  rank  of  sonnet- 
writers  a  poet  who  left  but  one  first-rate  sonnet 
seems  scarcely  right. 

In  modern  Europe  the  sonnet  has  always  had 
a  peculiar  fascination  for  poets  of  the  first- 
class — poets,  that  is,  in  whom  what  we  have 
called  poetic  energy  and  plastic  power  are 
equally  combined.  It  would  seem  that  the  very 
fact  that  the  sonnet  is  a  recognized  structure 
suggestive  of  mere  art — suggestive  in  some 
measure,  indeed,  of  what  Schiller  would  call 
"  sport "  in  art — has  drawn  some  of  the  most 
passionate  poets  in  the  world  to  the  sonnet  as 
the  medium  of  their  sincerest  utterances.  With- 
out being  coldly  artificial,  like  the  rondeau,  the 
sestina,  the  ballade,  the  villanelle,  &c.,  the 
sonnet  is  yet  so  artistic  in  structure,  its  form  is 
so  universally  known,  recognized,  and  adopted 
as  being  artistic,  that  the  too  fervid  spontaneity 
and  reality  of  the  poet's  emotion  may  be  in  a 
certain  degree  veiled,  and  the  poet  can  whisper 
as  from  behind  a  mask,  those  deepest  secrets 
of  the  heart  which  could  otherwise  only  find 
expression  in  purely  dramatic  forms. 

That  the  sonnet  was  invented,  not  in  Provence, 
as  French  critics  pretend,  but  in  Italy  in  the 
I3th  century,  is  pretty  clear,  but  by  whom  is 
still  perhaps  an  open  question.  Mr.  S.  Wadding- 
ton  (Sonnets  of  Living  Writers)  and  several 
other  contemporary  critics  attribute  to  Fra 
Guittone  the  honour  of  having  invented  the 


THE  SONNET  183 

form.  But  J.  A.  Symonds  has  reminded  us  that 
the  sonnet  beginning  Pero  chy  amore,  attributed 
to  Pier  delle  Vigne,  secretary  of  state  in  the 
Sicilian  court  of  Frederick,  has  claims  which  no 
student  of  early  Italian  poetry  can  ignore. 

As  regards  English  sonnets,  whether  the 
Petrarchan  and  the  Shakespearean  are  really  the 
best  of  all  possible  forms  we  need  not  inquire. 
But,  inasmuch  as  they  have  become  so  vital 
and  so  dominant  over  other  sonnet  forms  that 
whenever  we  begin  to  read  the  first  verse  of  an 
English  sonnet  we  expect  to  find  one  or  other 
of  these  recognised  rhyme  arrangements,  any 
departure  from  these  two  arrangements,  even 
though  the  result  be  such  a  magnificent  poem 
as  Shelley's  "  Ozymandias,"  disappoints  the 
expectation,  baffles  the  ear,  and  brings  with  it 
that  sense  of  the  fragmentary  and  the  inchoate 
to  which  we  have  before  alluded.  If,  however, 
some  writer  should  arise  with  sufficient  origin- 
ality of  metrical  endowment  and  sufficient 
poetic  power  to  do  what  Keats,  in  a  famous 
experiment  of  his  tried  to  do  and  failed — 
impress  the  public  ear  with  a  new  sonnet  struc- 
ture, impress  the  public  ear  so  powerfully  that 
a  new  kind  of  expectance  is  created  the  moment 
the  first  verse  of  a  sonnet  is  recited — then  there 
will  be  three  kinds  of  English  sonnets  instead 
of  two. 

With  regard  to  the  Petrarchan  sonnet,  all 
critics  are  perhaps  now  agreed  that,  while  the 
form  of  the  octave  is  invariable,  the  form  of  the 
sestet  is  absolutely  free,  save  that  the  emotions 
should  govern  the  arrangement  of  the  verses. 


184  POETRY 

But  as  regards  the  division  between  octave 
and  sestet,  Mark  Pattison  says,  with  great 
boldness,  but  perhaps  with  truth,  that  by 
blending  octave  with  sestet  Milton  missed  the 
very  object  and  end  of  the  Petrarchan  scheme. 
Another  critic,  however,  Mr.  Hall  Caine,  in  his 
preface  to  Sonnets  of  Three  Centuries,  contends 
that  by  making  "  octave  flow  into  sestet  with- 
out break  of  music  or  thought,"  Milton  con- 
sciously or  unconsciously  invented  a  new  form 
of  sonnet ;  that  is  to  say,  Milton,  in  his  use 
of  the  Petrarchan  octave  and  sestet  for  the 
embodiment  of  intellectual  substance  incapable 
of  that  partial  disintegration  which  Petrarch 
himself  always  or  mostly  sought,  invented  a 
species  of  sonnet  wluch  is  English  in  impetus, 
but  Italian,  or  partially  Italian,  in  structure. 
Hence  this  critic,  like  William  Sharp  (Sonnets 
of  this  Century}  divides  all  English  sonnets  into 
four  groups :— (i)  sonnets  of  Shakespearean 
structure  j  (2)  sonnets  of  octave  and  sestet  of 
Miltonic  structure ;  (3)  sonnets  of  contem- 
porary structure,  i.e.,  all  sonnets  on  the  Pet- 
rarchan model  in  which  the  metrical  and  in- 
tellectual "  wave  of  flow  and  ebb  "  (as  origin- 
ally formulated  by  the  present  writer  in  a 
sonnet  on  the  sonnet,  which  has  appeared  in 
most  of  the  recent  anthologies)  is  strictly 
observed,  and  in  which,  while  the  rhyme- 
arrangement  of  the  octave  is  invariable,  that 
of  the  sestet  is  free  ;  (4)  sonnets  of  miscellaneous 
structure. 

With  regard  to  what  is  called  the  contem- 
porary form, — a  Petrarchan  arrangement  with 


THE   SONNET  185 

a  sestet  divided  very  sharply  from  the  octave — 
the  crowning  difficulty  and  the  crowning 
triumph  of  the  sonnet  writer  has  always  been 
so  to  handle  the  rhythm  of  the  prescribed 
structure  as  to  make  it  seem  in  each  individual 
sonnet  the  inevitable  and  natural  rhythm  de- 
manded by  the  emotion  which  gives  the  in- 
dividual sonnet  birth,  and  this  can  perhaps 
only  be  acheived  when  the  richness  and  ap- 
parent complexity  of  the  rhyme-arrangement 
is  balanced  by  that  perfect  lucidity  and  sim- 
plicity of  syntax  which  is  the  special  quest  of 
the  "  sonnet  of  flow  and  ebb." 

The  wave  theory  has  found  acceptance  with 
most  recent  students  of  the  sonnet,  such  as 
Rossetti  and  the  late  Mark  Pattison,  J.  A. 
Symonds,  Mr.  Hall  Caine,  and  William  Sharp. 
J.  A.  Symonds,  indeed,  seems  to  hint  that  the 
very  name  given  by  the  Italians  to  the  two 
tercets,  the  volta  or  turn,  indicates  the  metrical 
meaning  of  the  form.  "  The  striking  meta- 
phorical symbol,"  says  he,  "  drawn  from  the 
observation  of  the  swelling  and  declining  wave 
can  even  in  some  examples  be  applied  to  sonnets 
on  the  Shakespearean  model ;  for,  as  a  wave 
may  fall  gradually  or  abruptly,  so  the  sonnet 
may  sink  with  stately  volume  or  with  precipitate 
subsidence  to  its  close.  Rossetti  furnishes  in- 
comparable examples  of  the  former  and  more 
desirable  conclusion  ;  Sydney  D obeli,  in  Home 
in  War  Time,  yields  an  extreme  specimen  of  the 
latter." 

And  now  as  to  the  Shakespearean  sonnet. 
Some  very  acute  critics  have  spoken  as  if  this 


186  POETRY 

form  were  merely  a  lawless  succession  of  three 
quatrains  clinched  by  a  couplet,  and  as  if  the 
number  of  the  quatrains  might  just  as  well 
have  been  two  or  four,  as  the  present  prescribed 
number  of  three.  If  this  were  so,  it  would 
unquestionably  be  a  serious  impeachment  of  the 
Shakespearean  sonnet,  for  save  in  the  poetry 
of  ingenuity  no  metric  arrangement  is  other- 
wise than  bad  unless  it  be  the  result  of  a  deep 
metrical  necessity. 

If  the  prescriptive  arrangement  of  three  quat- 
rains clinched  by  a  couplet  is  not  a  metrical 
necessity,  if  it  is  not  demanded  in  order  to 
prevent  the  couplet  from  losing  its  power,  such 
an  arrangement  is  idle  and  worse  than  idle  ; 
just  as,  in  the  case  of  the  Petrarchan  sonnet, 
if  it  can  be  shown  that  the  solid  unity  of  the 
outflowing  wave  can  be  maintained  as  com- 
pletely upon  three  rhymes  as  upon  two,  then 
the  restriction  of  the  octave  to  two  rhymes  is 
simple  pendantry.  But  he  who  would  test  the 
metrical  necessity  of  the  arrangement  in  the 
Shakespearean  sonnet  has  only  to  make  the 
experiment  of  writing  a  poem  of  two  quatrains 
with  a  couplet,  and  then  another  poem  of  four 
quatrains  with  a  couplet,  in  order  to  see  how 
inevitable  is  the  metrical  necessity  of  the 
Shakespearean  number  and  arrangement  for  the 
achievement  of  the  metrical  effort  which  Shakes- 
peare, Dray  ton,  and  others  sought.  While  in 
the  poem  of  two  quatrains  the  expected  couplet 
has  the  sharp  epigramatical  effect  of  the  couplet 
in  ordinary  stanzas  (such  as  that  of  ottava  rima, 
and  as  that  of  the  Venus  and  Adonis  stanza), 


THE   SONNET  187 

destroying  that  pensive  sweetness  which  is  the 
characteristic  of  the  Shakespearean  sonnet,  the 
poem  of  four  quatrains  is  just  sufficiently  long 
for  the  expected  pleasure  of  the  couplet  to  be 
dispersed  and  wasted. 

The  quest  of  the  Shakespearean  sonnet  is 
not,  like  that  of  the  sonnet  of  octave  and  sestet, 
senority,  and,  so  to  speak,  metrical  counter- 
point, but  sweetness  ;  and  the  sweetest  of  all 
possible  arrangements  in  English  versification 
is  a  succession  of  decasyllabic  quatrains  in 
alternate  rhymes  knit  together  and  clinched  by 
a  couplet — a  couplet  coming  not  so  far  from  the 
initial  verse  as  to  lose  its  binding  power,  and 
yet  not  so  near  the  initial  verse  that  the  ring 
of  epigram  disturbs  the  "  linked  sweetness  long 
drawn  out  "  of  this  movement,  but  sufficiently 
near  to  shed  its  influence  over  the  poem  back 
to  the  initial  verse.  A  chief  part  of  the  pleasure 
of  the  Shakespearean  sonnet  is  the  expectance 
of  the  climacteric  rest  of  the  couplet  at  the  end 
(just  as  a  chief  part  of  the  pleasure  of  the  sonnet 
of  octave  and  sestet  is  the  expectance  of  the 
answering  ebb  of  the  sestet  when  the  close  of 
the  octave  has  been  reached) ;  and  this  ex- 
pectance is  gratified  too  early  if  it  comes  after 
two  quatrains,  while,  if  it  comes  after  a  greater 
number  of  quatrains  than  three,  it  is  dispersed 
and  wasted  altogether. 

The  French  sonnet  has  a  regular  Petrarchan 
octave  with  a  sestet  of  three  rhymes  beginning 
with  a  couplet.  The  Spanish  sonnet  is  also 
based  on  the  pure  Italian  type,  and  is  extremely 
braceful  and  airy.  The  same  may  be  said  of  the 


i88  POETRY 

Portuguese  sonnet — a  form  of  which  the  illus- 
trious Camoens  has  left  nearly  three  hundred 
examples. 


VII 


THE  BALLAD  AND  OTHER  FORMS  OF 
VERSE 

M     AMPERE,   in  his  instructions  to 
the    Committee    appointed    in 
9     1852-53   to   search   for   the  re- 
mains of  ballads  in  France,  told 
the  collectors  to  look  for  the  following  charac- 
teristics : 

"  The  use  of  assonance  in  place  of  rhyme,  the 
brusque  character  of  the  recital,  the  textual 
repetition,  as  in  Homer,  of  the  speeches  of  the 
persons,  the  constant  use  of  certain  numbers, — 
as  three  and  seven, — and  the  representation  of 
the  commonest  objects  of  e very-day  life  as 
being  made  of  gold  and  silver." 

Among  English  writers  of  historical  ballads 
Macaulay   stands  easily   first,   although   Lock- 
hart's  Spanish  ballads  make  a  very  fine  second. 
The  very  first  requisite  in  a  ballad,  whether 
historic   or   romantic,   is   simplicity   of   rhyme 

189 


igo  POETRY 

arrangement  as  in  the  old  form  of   "  Chevy 
Chase." 

"  The  Persy  leaned  on  his  brand 
And  saw  the  Douglas  dee ; 
He  took  the  dead  man  by  the  hand, 
And  said  wae  me  for  thee." 

Extreme  simplicity  of  metre  being  the  first 
requisite  in  a  ballad,  it  follows  that  Tennyson's 
"  The  Revenge  "  and  "  The  Defence  of  Luck- 
now  "  are,  with  all  their  excellence,  failures. 

In  the  historical  ballad  the  first  requisite  is 
"  business."  Whatever  in  the  smallest  degree 
interferes  with  this,  whether  it  is  the  importa- 
tion of  unbusinesslike  matter,  or  the  use  of 
unbusinesslike  metre,  is  injurious.  Unexpected 
metrical  effects — fundamental  irregularites  of 
pause  and  stanzaic  arrangement — are  dan- 
gerous. 

If,  for  instance,  we  are  waiting  for  the  ex- 
pected striking  down  of  the  hero,  we  demand 
that  the  rhymes  and  their  arrangement  shall 
be  aids  in  our  rush  towards  the  catastrophe  ; 
and  if  we  are  suddenly  brought  to  a  halt  by 
finding  no  answering  rhyme  where  we  expected 
one,  and  have  to  ask  ourselves  when  this 
expected  rhyme  is  to  come,  our  imaginative 
pleasure  is  baffled  and  thwarted  to  a  certain 


THE   BALLAD  191 

extent.  The  otherwise  fine  ballad,  '  The  Re- 
venge/ is  very  seriously  injured  by  forgetful- 
ness  of  this  most  obvious  law.  Long  lines  and 
short  lines,  long  stanzas  and  short  stanzas,  are 
mixed  up  without  the  slightest  principle  at 
moments  when  the  reader's  imagination  has  no 
time  to  wait ;  and,  moreover,  some  of  the  lines 
are  so  harsh  as  to  be  with  difficulty  scanned. 
It  is  a  pity,  for  the  ballad  has  every  requisite 
but  this  one.  Yet  it  is  doubtful  whether  Tenny- 
son's genius — energetic  always,  but  never  brisk 
— is  suited  to  the  historical  ballad.  There  are 
symptoms  of  a  spurring  of  Pegasus  in  the  lines 
of  "  The  Defence  of  Lucknow  "—a  rather 
exclamatory  style,  which  an  ungallant  criticism 
would  call  feminine,  and  which  makes  us  think 
that,  varied  as  were  his  gifts,  this  kind  of  work 
is  hardly  in  harmony  with  them. 

As  to  the  Romantic  Border  ballads,  if  they 
are  to  be  taken  as  a  true  reflex  of  the  character- 
istics of  the  people  for  whom  they  were  sung, 
it  was  in  the  north  of  England  that  wild  passions 
akin  to  those  which  we  associate  with  Southern 
Europe  were  in  former  times  seen  ;  in  virtue 
as  in  crime  the  likeness  between  the  two  was 
very  striking. 

Two  of  the  foremost  poets  who  flourished  late 


192  POETRY 

in  the  Victorian  period — William  Morris  and 
Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti — men  known  to  be 
richly  endowed  with  humour  themselves,  had  a 
theory  that  in  high  romantic  poetry  humour 
had  no  place,  and  this  in  spite  of  the  glaring 
fact  that  the  greatest  poet  in  all  literature, 
Shakespeare,  was  also  among  the  greatest 
humorists  of  the  world,  and  was  constantly 
introducing  humour  into  poetry.  This  makes 
it  necessary  before  treating  of  the  variety  of 
humorous  poetry  such  as  parody,  mock  heroic, 
comic  opera,  vers  de  societi,  etc.,  to  inquire 
whether  humour  has  any  place  in  high  poetry 
and,  if  so,  what  kind  of  humour. 

In  the  "  Paradise  of  Fruits,"  the  judge  who 
decided  upon  the  stolen  flavours  of  the  pine- 
apple, was  '  the  taster  without  a  palate."  And, 
in  the  same  way,  we  may  be  sure  that,  among 
the  sixty  members  of  that  famous  "  Court  of 
Humour  "  held  at  Heracleum,  the  man  whose 
function  it  was  to  record  the  jokes  for  King 
Philip  was  the  dullest  out  of  sixty  dullards. 

For,  although  the  desire  to  be  witty  and 
humorous  is  universal,  it  seems  to  be  stronger 
in  dull  people  than  in  others.  The  fact  is 
curious,  and  deserves  the  attention  of  the  philo- 
sophical inquirer.  In  a  classification  of  dullards, 


THE   BALLAD  193 

for  instance,  the  highest  place  must  be  given  to 
the  middle-class  Briton,  yet  there  are  more 
jokes  cracked  over  a  single  Bayswater  dinner 
than  were  ever  cracked  over  an  Attic  wine 
party — more  "  funny  "  things  said  in  the  Stock 
Exchange  in  a  single  day  than  were  said  in  a 
week  at  the  Mermaid,  or  in  Jerrold's  gatherings 
by  Covent  Garden.  Yet  this,  which  to  the 
superficial  inquirer  seems  anomalous,  is,  as  we 
shall  show,  perfectly  natural.  There  are,  in- 
deed, no  anomalies  in  Nature  ;  we  have  only 
to  go  deep  enough  to  find  everything  in  harmony. 

The  true  inference  to  be  drawn  from  the  facts 
is,  not  that  the  dull  people  have  really  a  stronger 
yearning  to  be  facetious  than  the  bright  ones,  but 
that  they  seem  to  do  so  by  their  superior  strength 
of  numbers,  and  that,  as  the  one  touch  of  nature 
that  makes  the  whole  world  kin  is  the  desire 
to  be  humorous,  humour  has  been  supposed  to 
be  the  "  principium  hylarchicum"  of  the  Cosmos. 

Humour  is  as  difficult  as  poetry  itself  to  be 
defined.  Critics  use  the  loosest  language  con- 
cerning it :  they  almost  always  confuse  wit  and 
humour,  and  speak  of  humour  as  though  it  were 
only  another  name  for  wit.  Not  only  are  the 
two  temperamental  qualities  not  the  same,  but 
they  are  the  opposites  of  each  other,  although 


194  POETRY 

they  are  sometimes  combined  in  the  same 
writer. 

As  we  have  already  hinted,  the  greatest  master 
of  poetic  humour  that  has  appeared  in  English 
literature  since  Burns  is  Hood,  as  seen  in  "Miss 
Killmensegg."  Burns,  however,  stands  ahead 
of  all  English  poets  as  regards  humour,  and  he 
often  reaches  a  high  mark  as  an  absolute 
humorist. 

Dickens  does  not  come  within  the  scope  of  an 
article  upon  poetry.  In  treating  of  the  comic 
opera  of  W.  S.  Gilbert,  we  have  to  draw  a 
distinction  between  comedy  and  farce.  The 
very  laws  of  their  existence  are  in  conflict  with 
each  other — in  conflict  so  much  that  where  one 
lives  the  other  must  die. 

Of  Comedy,  in  short,  the  breath  of  life  is 
illusion  ;  of  Farce,  the  breath  of  life  is  mock- 
illusion.  Comedy,  whether  "broad"  or  "gen- 
teel," is  a  make-believe.  She  pretends  that  her 
mummery  is  real.  Farce,  whether  "  broad  "  or 
"  genteel,"  is  the  very  soul  of  frankness.  By 
a  thousand  tricks,  which  she  keeps  up 
between  herself  and  her  audience,  she  says, 
"  My  acting  is  all  sham,  and  you  know  it." 
Yet  we  find  all  the  critics — even  Charles  Lamb 
himself — talking  of  Farce  as  if  she  were  merely 


THE   BALLAD  195 

Comedy  with  a  broadened  grin — Thalia  with 
her  girdle  loose  and  run  wild. 

Between  the  two  the  difference  is  not  one 
of  degree  at  all — it  is  one  of  kind.  The  fun  of 
Comedy  may  be  just  as  broad  as  that  of  Farce, 
as  in  the  Dogberry  scenes  in  "  Much  ado  about 
nothing  "  ;  and  Farce  can  be  just  as  genteel 
as  Comedy  herself,  even  when  putting  on  her 
genteelest  airs  in  Tottenham  Street  or  Sloane 
Square. 

But  here  is  the  fundamental  difference  be- 
tween the  two:  probability  of  incident,  logical 
sequence  of  cause  and  effect,  are  as  necessary 
to  the  very  existence  of  Comedy  as  they  are 
to  Tragedy  herself,  while  Farce  would  stifle 
in  such  air.  Rather,  she  would  be  poisoned 
by  it  just  as  Comedy  would  be  poisoned  by  what 
Farce  flourishes  on — that  is  to  say,  in  conse- 
quence of  reasoning — topsy-turvy  logic.  Born 
in  the  fairy  country  of  Topsy-turvy,  her  logic 
would  be  illogical  if  it  were  not  upside  down. 

So  with  coincidence — with  improbable  accum- 
ulation of  convenient  events.  Farce  can  no 
more  exist  without  these  than  Comedy  can 
exist  with  them. 

W.  S.  Gilbert's  comic  operas  are  all  farces — 
farces  of  the  most  brilliant  kind.  The  Mikado, 


196  POETRY 

although  it  owes  much  to  the  superlative  music 
of  Sullivan,  is,  of  course,  the  broadest  farce 
from  beginning  to  end.  And  the  accomplished 
actors  who  represented  it  spared  no  pains  to 
show  the  farcical  atmosphere. 

It  is  superfluous  to  give  examples  of  works 
that  everybody  knows.  But  take  the  song  of 
"  the  First  Lord  of  the  Admiralty."  This  is 
the  very  perfection  of  farce.  It  tells  how  an 
office  boy,  whose  function  was  to  polish  the 
handle  of  the  front  door,  becomes  by  his  assi- 
duity in  polishing  the  First  Lord  of  the  Ad- 
miralty and  "  the  ruler  of  the  Queen's  Navee." 

We  have  now  to  turn  to  those  artificial  forms 
of  verse  which  for  a  short  time  had  a  vogue  in 
England.  Of  these  the  rondeau  is  perhaps  the 
most  notable. 

The  rondeau  is  a  short  metrical  structure 
which  in  its  perfect  form  is  divided  into  three 
strophes  of  unequal  length,  knit  together  by 
rapidly  recurrent  rhymes  and  a  refrain. 

The  laws  of  the  rondeau  have  varied  at  dif- 
ferent periods,  and  even  with  different  poets  of 
the  same  period — varied  so  fundamentally  that 
some  important  critics  have  found  a  generic 
difference  between  the  "  rondeau "  and  the 
"rondel"  or  "  rondet." 


THE   BALLAD  197 

Rondeau,  however,  is  possibly  nothing  more 
than  the  modern  spelling  of  the  word  rondel, 
as  marteau  is  the  modern  spelling  of  martel, 
chateau  of  chdtel,  etc.  When  the  rondeau  was 
called  the  rondel  it  was  mostly  written  in  four- 
teen octosyllabic  lines  of  two  rhymes  as  in  the 
rondels  of  Charles  d'Orleans. 

In  this  variability  of  structure  it  contrasts 
with  the  stability  of  the  Sonnet.  The  structure 
under  consideration,  whether  called  rondeau 
or  rondel  or  rondet,  may,  it  seems,  consist  of  any 
number  of  lines  from  eight  to  thirteen. 

But  when  we  find  that  the  kind  of  triolet 
used  by  Froissart  is  a  "  rondel "  we  are  com- 
pelled to  admit  that  the  names  given  to  this 
form  are  very  elastic. 

In  Clement  Marot's  time,  however,  the  laws  of 
the  rondeau  became  more  settled,  and,  accord- 
ing to  Voiture,  in  the  iyth  century  the  approved 
form  of  the  rondeau  was  a  structure  of  thirteen 
lines  and  a  refrain. 

Ma  foy,  c'est  fait  de  moy,  car  Isabeau 
M'a  conjurd  de  luy  faire  un  Rondeau : 

Cela  me  met  en  une  peine  extreme. 

Quoy  treize  vers,  huit  en  eau,  cinq  en  tone, 
Je  luy  ferois  aussi-tot  un  bateau  1 


198  POETRY 

En  voil£  cinq  pourtant  en  un  monceau  : 
Faisons  en  huiet,  en  invoquant  Brodeau, 
En  puis  mettons,  par  quelque  stratageme, 
Ma  foy,  c'est  fait ! 

Si  je  pouvois  encore  de  mon  cerveau 
Tirer  cinq  vers,  1'ouvrage  seroit  beau  ; 
Mais  cependant,  je  suis  dedans  1'onzieme, 
Et  si  je  croy  que  je  fais  le  douzieme 
En  voila  treize  ajustez  au  niveau. 
Ma  foy,  c'est  fait! 

All  forms  of  the  rondeau,  or  rondel,  however, 
are  alike  in  this  that  the  distinguishing  metrical 
emphasis  is  achieved  by  a  peculiar  use  of  the 
refrain.  Though  we  have  the  English  rondels 
of  Occleve  and  a  set  of  rondeaus  in  the  Rolliad 
(written  by  Dr.  Lawrence,  the  friend  of  Burke, 
according  to  Mr.  Edmund  Gosse,  who  has  given 
us  an  admirable  essay  upon  exotic  forms  of  verse), 
even  in  such  comparatively  inartistic  forms  of 
verse  as  those  introduced  by  Herrick  and 
Cowley,  and  other  poets  and  light  versifiers  of 
the  seventeenth  century,  the  Poetry  of  In- 
genuity, in  the  shape  of  pure  dilettantism,  has 
never  really  flourished  in  this  country — never 
flourished,  for  example,  as  it  has  flourished  on 
the  Continent,  where,  to  write  a  poem  in  the 
shape  of  a  wine-glass  or  a  decanter  was  con- 
sidered an  effort  of  high  poetic  genius;  never 


THE   BALLAD  199 

flourished  as  it  has  done  in  Asia,  where  vers 
de  societe  (whether  Arabic  or  Persian,  Turkish 
or  Hindoostani)  must,  to  be  vers  de  societe  at  all, 
have  a  repetition  of  the  same  rhyme  in  every 
alternate  line. 

Nay,  if  we  had  room  here  to  prove  our  case, 
we  would  have  almost  ventured  upon  the  asser- 
tion that  the  temper  of  the  English  Muse  is  not 
really  favourable  to  Poetry  of  Ingenuity  in  any 
form,  unless  it  coruscates  with  fancy  or  is 
steeped  in  the  many  coloured  dyes  of  life — 
not  even  to  such  simple  mechanism  as  that  of  the 
imported  double-rhymed  ottava  rima  of  the 
modern  mock-heroic  (which,  if  we  are  to  judge 
from  the  fate  of  "  Whistlecraft,"  the  once- 
famous  "  Godiva  "  of  Moustrie,  "  Maimoune," 
"  Sir  Launfal,"  etc.,  cannot  live  unless  in- 
formed by  the  robust  humour  of  Byron  ;  not 
even  to  such  brilliant,  though  still  simple, 
metrical  rope-dancing  as  that  of  "  Miss  Kill- 
mansegg,"  which  could  not  have  lived,  we 
think,  without  the  brilliant  wit,  and  often 
profound  humour,  of  Hood.  While  in  France 
metrical  skill  may  be  (and,  far  too  often,  is) 
the  end  itself  of  versification,  it  is  never  in 
this  country  more  (properly)  than  a  means  to 
an  end. 


200  POETRY 

It  was  not  till  our  own  day  that  this  form, 
together  with  many  other  forms  of  artificial 
verse,  had  a  sudden  ephemeral  vogue  in  Eng- 
land. Some  of  the  English  rondeaus  written 
during  that  brief  period  are  as  bright  and 
graceful  as  Voiture's  own. 

As  to  rondeaus  on  the  pure  French  model  of  a 
rhymeless  refrain,  we  believe  them  to  be,  even 
in  French  poetry,  always  disappointing  and  bad, 
and  in  English  poetry  intolerable.  We  can 
easily  understand  why  so  fine  a  metricist  as 
Swinburne  refused  in  his  Century  of  Rondels  to 
write  rondeaus  with  a  rhymeless  refrain.  Swin- 
burne, who  in  his  Century  of  Rondels  was  the 
first  to  make  the  refrain  rhyme  with  the  second 
line  of  the  first  strophe,  seemed  as  though  he 
would  bring  the  form  into  high  poetry. 

Although  the  origin  of  the  refrain  in  all 
poetry  was  no  doubt  the  impro  visa  tore's  need 
of  a  rest,  a  time  in  which  to  focus  his  forces 
and  recover  breath  for  future  flights,  the  re- 
frain in  all  forms  where  it  is  used  has  a  distinct 
metrical  value  of  its  own,  it  knits  the  structure 
together,  and  so  intensifies  the  emotional  energy, 
as  we  see  in  the  Border  ballads,  in  the  "  Oriana  " 
of  Lord  Tennyson,  and  especially  in  the  "  Sister 
Helen  "  of  Rossetti. 


THE   BALLAD  201 

The  suggestion  of  extreme  artificiality — of 
"  difficulty  overcome " — which  is  one  great 
fault  of  the  rondeau  as  a  vehicle  for  deep  emotion, 
does  not  therefore  spring  from  the  use  of  the 
refrain,  but  from  the  too  frequent  recurrence 
of  the  rhymes  in  the  strophes — for  which  there 
is  no  metrical  necessity  as  in  the  case  of  the 
Petrarchan  sonnet.  "  Difficulty  Overcome," 
though  a  legitimate  source  of  pleasure  in  French 
poetry  even  of  the  most  serious  kind,  finds  no 
place  in  the  serious  poetry  of  England. 

We  have  alluded  above  to  the  extraordinary 
passion  that  sprang  up  in  England  during  the 
eighties  of  last  century,  vigorously  flourished, 
and  then  rapidly  subsided,  for  all  forms  of 
artificial  verse,  of  which  the  rondeau  was  the 
most  important.  It  came  of  course  from 
France.  The  country  seemed  ringing  with 
rondeaus,  ballads,  villanelles,  triolettes,  pan- 
toums  and  other  forms  with  equally  fantastic 
names,  with  elaborate  repetitions  of  rhyme. 

That  it  is  possible  to  have  too  little  of  such 
a  good  thing  as  rhyme  Walt  Whitman's  poetic 
achievements  have  shown ;  but  it  is  quite  clear 
that  in  this,  as  in  all  other  matters,  "  too  much 
of  a  good  thing  "  is  a  sorer  sorrow  than  too 
little. 


202  POETRY 

Hence  the  student  after  studying  these  forms 
turned  to  the  Leaves  of  Grass,  and  in  those 
marvellous  pages  found,  if  not  so  much  joy  as 
the  Whitmanians  can  find  therein,  still  a  com- 
fort and  a  solace  such  as  only  he  can  know 
who  has  narrowly  escaped  being  rhymed  to 
death.  Not  that  we  have  a  word  to  say  against 
artificial  forms  of  verse. 

In  the  art  of  poetry  there  are  and  always  have 
been  delights  of  two  opposite  kinds  :  the  delight 
of  the  poetic  art  which  conceals  art,  and  the 
delight  of  the  poetic  art  which  makes  art 
manifest.  There  is  the  delight  afforded  by  him 
who  hides  his  art  in  the  Iliad,  and  there  is  the 
delight  afforded  by  the  chorus  of  singers  in  what 
are  called  "  fixed  forms  "  ;  who  did  not  (and 
for  the  world  would  not)  have  their  art  con- 
cealed. 

But  here  is  the  difference  between  him  of 
the  Iliad  and  the  writer  of  the  ballades,  pan- 
toums,  vilanelles,  etc.,  that  while  it  is  impossible 
to  have  too  much  of  the  former,  it  is  painfully 
possible  to  have  a  deal  too  much  of  the  latter. 
The  feasible  rhymes  in  English  are  not  so 
numerous  but  that  every  reader  of  verse  soon 
has  them  at  his  fingers'  ends.  For  a  time  it  is 
pleasant  to  see  with  what  tact  and  ingenuity 


THE   BALLAD  203 

the  ballade-writer  will  fill  in  his  bouts  rim£s. 
But  this  pleasure  does  not  last  long.  After 
reading  a  few  score  of  ballades  the  curiosity  in 
the  writer's  manipulations  of  his  rhymes  flags. 
After  reading  a  few  hundreds  of  ballades  what 
was  before  simply  wearisome  becomes  intoler- 
able, till  at  last  the  very  sight  of  a  ballade  on 
the  page  of  a  magazine  was  at  the  time  when 
these  poems  were  fashionable,  calculated  to  give 
the  reader  a  painful  shudder. 

The  trick  which  at  first  seemed  interesting 
gradually  appears  jejune  and  worse  than  worth- 
less ;  and  the  criticism  that  applies  to  the  ballade 
applies  to  the  rondeau,  the  sestina,  the  triolet, 
and  those  other  fixed  forms  for  the  inspiration  of 
which  the  English  poet  is  apparently  indebted  to 
Walker's  rhyming  dictionary. 

This  criticism,  however,  does  not  apply,  we 
think,  to  the  sonnet,  even  in  its  most  rigid 
Petrarchan  form,  for  reasons  which  we  have 
discussed  elsewhere. 

Between  the  ballades  of  Lang  (charming  as 
they  are)  and  the  ballades  of  Henley  and  Mr. 
Austin  Dobson  (charming  as  they  are)  the  dif- 
ference is  that  of  substance  ;  it  is  never,  and 
can  never  be,  a  difference  of  spontaneous 
rhythmic  movement,  as  in  the  sonnet.  Nor  is 


204  POETRY 

this  the  only  reason  why  it  is  so  easy  to  have  too 
many  of  these  artificial  forms.  There  is  an- 
other reason  quite  as  strong  :  in  art  tours  de 
force,  whether  the  artist's  vehicle  be  marble  or 
colours,  or  words,  have  just  as  much  value  and 
just  as  little  as  have  prodigies  in  Nature. 

Art,  undoubtedly,  has  her  sportive  side — a 
fact  which  seems  to  be  forgotten  by  those  who 
rail  against  the  muse  of  "  debonair  verse  " — 
that  jaunty  muse  who,  leaving  heroism  and 
imagination  to  her  sisters  Calliope  and  the  rest, 
says  to  them  :  "  Do  ye  think  that  because  ye  are 
virtuous  there  shall  be  no  more  cakes  and 
ale  ?  "  It  will  not  be  forgotten  that  no  artistic 
effort  can  be  challenged  if  it  reach  its  own 
proper  goal.  If  "  debonair  verse  "  did  really 
represent  England's  contempory  poetry,  it  would 
be  right  to  say  that  such  a  fact  was  not  exhila- 
rating— it  would  be  right  to  say  that  "  Eng- 
land's heroism  and  imagination  are  not  to  be 
judged  by  her  verse  at  that  moment." 

The  craze  reached  such  a  pass  that  it  aroused 
the  wrath  of  the  American  poet-critic  Stedman, 
who,  in  the  revised  edition  of  The  Victorian 
Poets,  gave  strong  utterance  to  his  wrath  and 
indignation  at  this  degradation  of  the  noblest 
imaginative  literature  of  any  race  or  tongue. 


THE   BALLAD  205 

This  was  to  take  the  matter  much  too  seriously. 
The  seeds  of  dissolution  were  apparent  in  the 
thing  from  the  first.  And  now  it  is  interesting 
to  compare  these  artificial  forms  with  the  forms 
of  the  new  school  of  2oth  century  poets,  with 
Mr.  John  Masefield  at  their  head. 

In  answer  to  these  strictures  we  have  but  to 
reply,  he  who  expected  to  find  heroism  and 
imagination  in  such  twiddlings  of  the  lyre  as 
ballades,  kyrielles,  pantoums,  sestinas,  vil- 
lanelles,  would  be  a  very  sanguine  critic.  Lang's 
piece  is  charming,  but  it  would  be  so  no  longer 
if  it  pretended  to  be  anything  more  than  a 
"  ballade  in  blue  china."  It  is  not  given  to  man 
to  be  heroic  while  dancing  in  spangles. 

Reginald  Scot  says  in  his  Discoverie  of  Witch- 
craft :  "  Irishmen.  .  .  will  not  sticke  to  affirme 
that  they  can  rime  either  man  or  beaste  to 
deathe."  Without  preferring  any  opinion  as 
to  the  lethal  wizardry  of  Irishmen,  we,  for  our 
part,  will  not  "sticke  to  ainrme"  that  English- 
men (aided  and  abetted  by  Scotchmen  and 
Americans)  can  rhyme  a  student  of  poetry  to 
death.  If  on  Parnassus  there  is  a  place  at  all 
for  the  muse  of  "  debonair  verse  "  it  is  far  down 
on  the  lowest  slopes. 

Stedman   speaks   forcibly,    and   yet   with   a 


206  POETRY 

fine  judicial  temper,  about  the  recent  degrada- 
tion of  "  the  noblest  imaginative  literature 
of  any  race  or  tongue  "  by  poets  who,  having 
nothing  to  say,  say  it  admirably  in  bouts  rim&s. 

Our  great  English  masters  have  never  known 
anything  of  the  poetry  of  ingenuity.  Sidney 
and  Drummond  and  others  did  no  doubt  try 
their  hands  at  the  sestina  and  the  like,  but  then 
even  Sidney's  place  as  a  poet  is  a  long  way  from 
the  first. 

The  metres  in  which  not  only  Shakespeare, 
Marlowe,  and  Milton,  but  also  Coleridge,  Keats, 
and  Shelley  sang,  were  simplicity  itself  com- 
pared with  these  elaborate  forms — these  forms 
in  which,  according  to  Stedman's  notion,  the 
"  heroism  and  imagination  "  of  English  poetry 
have  now  become  stifled.  The  most  elaborate 
metrical  structure  ever  attempted  by  England's 
greatest  rhythmist,  Coleridge,  was  perhaps  the 
"  Ode  to  France." 

But  Stedman  seems  to  forget  that,  on  the 
other  hand,  where  the  motive  power  of  a  poem  is 
neither  passion,  imagination,  nor  meditation, 
but  fancy  or  some  other  kind  of  sport,  the  self- 
conscious  art  of  the  poet  may,  and  perhaps  should, 
be  brought  so  prominently  forward  as  to  pro- 
claim itself  for  artifice,  and  Stedman  ought  to 


THE   BALLAD  207 

have   remembered   Schiller's   profound   remark 
that  "  art  is  sport." 

And  now  as  to  vers  de  Societe. 

If  the  poet  depicts  contemporary  society, 
ideality  is  more  essential  in  this  form  than  in 
any  other  department  of  poetic  art.  This  is 
what  we  mean  :  so  perennially  fresh  is  Nature — 
so  infinite  in  the  variety  of  her  beauty — that  she 
may  be  rendered  with  the  photographic  accur- 
acy of  Tennyson  and  the  sympathy  of  Words- 
worth and  beauty  will  be  the  result. 

And  as  to  the  great  elemental  characteristics 
of  human  nature  so  eternally  interesting  are 
they — so  rich  in  colour  are  the  universal  passions 
of  man — that  these,  too,  may  be  painted  with 
close  realism  and,  again,  beauty  may  be  the 
result. 

But,  with  convention,  it  is  not  so.  Yet 
through  every  poem,  no  matter  what  the  sub- 
ject— be  it  joyful  or  sad,  heroic  or  terrible— 
the  breath  of  beauty  must  be  felt  blowing  like 
a  breeze  from  Heaven  :  and  vers  de  societe  are 
no  exception. 

But  no  poet  could  ever  make  modern  society 
beautiful ;  the  painting,  even  in  prose,  of  London 
"  society "  realistically  would  result  in  some- 
thing quite  unreadable. 


208  POETRY 

This  is  why  most  writers  of  vers  de  societe 
adopt  the  cynicism,  which,  through  the  mere 
expression  of  Thackeray's  individual  tempera- 
ment, Robertson  and  the  kettledrum  dramatists 
mistook,  it  seems,  for  the  temperament  of  a 
class. 

It  follows,  therefore,  that  the  writer  of  vers 
de  societe  must  imagine  a  form  of  society  of  his 
own,  or  go  to  societies  of  the  past  for  his  pictures. 

The  best  vers  de  societe  are  rarely  the  produc- 
tion of  those  who  have  seen  most — the  Bucking- 
hams,  the  Rochesters,  the  Dorsets — but  of  those 
who  have  the  advantage  of  that  "distance" 
which  (in  the  case  of  courts  especially)  "  lends 
enchantment  to  the  view." 

For  we  do  not  consider  such  moralisings  as 
the  "  Conseils  a  une  Parisienne,"  and  "  A  la 
mi-Car  erne "  of  that  darling  of  the  court, 
Alfred  de  Musset,  vers  de  societe  in  the  proper 
sense  of  that  word,  but  satires  rather — satires 
in  the  mood  of  Byron's  "  Waltz  "  ;  while  the 
notion  that  Praed  was  really  a  man  of  society 
in  the  general  acceptation  of  the  word  is  a 
popular  error.  Something  of  it  he  knew,  but 
not  so  much  as  he  could  have  seen,  from  his 
social  position. 

Alfred  de  Musset,  too,  in  some  parts  of  his 


THE   BALLAD  209 

"  Sur  trois  Marches  de  Marbre  Rose  "  has  left  his 
impress.  By  Theodore  de  Banville,  however, 
the  great  modern  master  of  dilettantism,  he 
seems  to  have  been  influenced  not  so  much  as 
by  those  earlier  poets  who  have  influenced 
Theodore  de  Banville. 

Theodore  de  Banville  has  lately  been  playing 
with  (in  his  "  Odes  Funambulesque  "  and  "  Oc- 
tidentales  "),  the  triolet,  the  villanelle,  and  the 
Malayan  pantoum.  The  temper  of  the  English 
Muse  is  against  dilettantism  ;  so,  perhaps,  is 
the  genius  of  the  English  language.  One  thing 
is  essential  in  vers  de  societe — perfection  of  form. 
And  this  is  seen,  we  think,  in  our  vers  de  societe, 
which,  like  all  the  other  varieties  of  the  Poetry 
of  Ingenuity,  has,  in  England,  as  we  have  said 
above,  to  rely  for  its  vitality  upon  other  quali- 
ties than  those  of  delicate  workmanship.  Prior, 
until  the  coming  of  Mr.  Austin  Dobson,  was 
our  greatest  name.  But  the  vitality  still  left 
in  Prior  is  owing  not  to  his  workmanship,  but 
to  his  exceedingly  fine  humour.  The  same 
may  be  said  with  regard  to  Praed,  who  coupled 
a  power  of  epigram — sometimes  true,  if  some- 
times false — with  an  endowment  of  humour 
which,  though  far  below  Prior's,  was  still 
respectable, 


2io  POETRY 

And  it  is  just  the  same  with  all  varieties 
of  the  Poetry  of  Ingenuity — mock-heroic,  comic 
story,  court  poetry,  parody,  or  what  not;  the 
flavour  must  be  as  bracing,  stinging,  and  full- 
bodied  as  that  of  British  ale. 

And  if  we  were  asked  for  a  reason  for  this, 
we  should  be  sufficiently  insular,  we  think,  to 
say  that  England  is  peculiarly  the  land  of 
"  the  Poetry  of  Inspiration  " — a  complete  an- 
swer, if  true.  For  the  Poetry  of  Inspiration — 
that  melodious  utterance  which  is  born  (or  is 
assumed  to  be  born)  of  irresistible  impulse- 
is  the  exact  antithesis  of  the  Poetry  of  Ingenuity, 
that  melodious  utterance  whose  quest  is  "  pleas- 
urable surprise  "  in  some  shape,  such  as  that  of 
difficulty  overcome,  or  the  like.  To  be  con- 
scious and  at  the  same  time  unconscious,  in- 
spired as  Cassandra  and  yet  "  knowing "  as 
the  Jackdaw  of  Rheims,  is  altogether  beyond 
the  power  of  any  muse  whatsoever.  In  French 
poetry  there  is  always  and  properly  a  pleasur- 
able sense  of  "  difficulty  overcome:  "  hence  its 
delight,  among  other  things,  in  the  barbarism 
of  rime  riche.  But  neither  in  rondeaus  nor 
rondels,  villanelles  nor  pantoums,  wine-glass 
stanzas  nor  decanter  stanzas,  can  the  English 
Muse  give  utterance  to  that  "  divinity  which 


THE   BALLAD  211 

seizes  the  soul  and  guides  it  at  his  will."  And 
it  is,  we  think,  because  English  poetry  is  specially 
and  peculiarly  the  utterance  of  that  "  divine 
guide  "  that  the  taste  for  the  Poetry  of  Ingenuity 
is  not  strong  in  these  islands,  that  the  taste  for 
dilettantism  in  poetry  scarcely  exists  here  at 
all. 

Form  is  written  neither  in  rhyme  nor  in 
blank  verse,  nor  in  prose,  but  belongs  entirely 
to  the  poetry  of  arithmetic,  and  takes  rank  with 
those  verses  written  in  the  shape  of  lozenges 
and  bottles  which  were  once  in  vogue  on  the 
Continent. 

An  extreme  instance  of  the  danger  of  writing 
serious  poetry  in  elaborate  verse  is  exemplified 
by  a  modern  poet  in  a  poem  called  "  The  Dance 
of  Death."  The  writer  of  this  poem  narrowly 
escaped  writing  the  finest  meditative  poem  of 
our  time — one  of  the  finest,  indeed,  in  the 
English  language.  He  escapes  doing  so  simply 
because  he  is  so  much  too  clever  a  rhymer  for  a 
mere  poet,  and  must  needs  write  it  in  a  sestina 
— that  is  to  say  a  sestina  of  sixty  lines. 

A  sestina  is  a  poem  written  neither  in  rhyme 
nor  blank  verse,  but  in  so-called  six-line  stanzas, 
each  of  which  has  to  take  the  last  word  of  the 
stanza  preceding  it,  and  twist  it  about  into  some 


212  POETRY 

new  and  fantastic  meaning,  and  then  to  go  on 
twisting  every  other  line  in  the  same  way. 

Thus  if,  as  in  a  certain  sestina,  the  first  line 
in  the  first  stanza  ends  with  "  paradise,"  the 
second  line  with  "  heart,"  the  third  line  with 
"  tears,"  the  fourth  line  with  "  fan,"  .the  fifth 
line  with  "  rose,"  and  the  sixth  line  with  "  fate," 
the  line  endings  of  all  the  other  stanzas  must 
be  "paradise,"  "heart,"  "tears,"  "  fan,"  "rose," 
"  fate,"  only  that  each  stanza  has  a  line  ar- 
rangement of  its  own. 

Of  course  it  is  not,  save  from  the  arithmetic- 
ian's point  of  view,  versification  at  all ;  there- 
fore, many  judges  consider  it  to  be  the  supreme 
work  of  poetic  art  in  fixed  forms,  and  laments 
that  the  sestina  has  been  "  comparatively 
an  exotic  in  French  poetry,  as  in  English, 
until  recent  years."  French  poetry  we  must 
leave  to  the  French  critics,  but  that  the  sestina 
may  remain  comparatively  an  exotic  in  English 
poetry  is  what  we  earnestly  hope. 

Now  in  this  form  "  The  Dance  of  Death  "  is 
written.  And  now  for  the  substance  of  the 
poem. 

Underlying  its  deep  pathos  and  solemnity 
there  is  in  "  The  Dance  of  Death  "  a  sort  of 
Shakespearean  humour  which,  as  far  as  we 


THE   BALLAD  213 

know,  has  hardly  been  reached  by  any  other 
poem.  Why,  then,  has  it  not  taken  its  place 
in  the  first  rank  of  our  meditative  poetry  ? 
Simply  because  of  the  poet's  appalling  clever- 
ness— simply  because  his  poem,  being  written 
in  one  of  the  most  absurdly  artificial  measures 
ever  invented  even  in  that  paradise  of  the 
arithmetical  bards,  Provence,  wants,  or  seems 
to  want  (which  artistically  is  the  same  thing), 
that  salt  of  sincerity  which  is  the  salt  of  poetic 
life. 

It  is  difficult  to  imagine  how  sophisticated 
must  have  become  the  ear  and  the  taste  of  a 
poet  who,  setting  out  to  discourse  of  death 
in  the  profound  mood  of  him  whose  moralizings 
in  Elsinore  churchyard  are  for  all  times  and 
for  all  lands,  could  betake  himself  to  his  lyre, 
arithmetical  table  in  hand,  and  rack  his  fine 
calculating  powers  to  find  what  are  the  feasible 
rhymes  for  a  sixty-two-line  poem  in  which  all 
the  stanzas  shall  run  on  the  same  rhymes  as 
those  of  the  first  stanza  ! 

No  doubt  the  ingenuity  required  to  construct 
such  a  metrical  {ramework  and  to  fill  it  with 
real  intellectual  and  poetical  ore,  is  so  high  as  to 
be  in  itself  a  kind  of  genius. 

But  between  artifice,  however  high,  and  art 


214  POETRY 

there  is  a  deep  gulf  fixed.  To  an  unsophisti- 
cated ear  this  reiteration  of  the  rhyme  sound, 
which  to  the  poets  of  ingenuity  seems  the  "  be- 
all  and  end-all  "  of  the  rhymer's  art,  gives  no 
pleasure  at  all,  but  irritation — irritation  because 
the  fantastic  wrestlings  with  the  lyre  proper 
to  the  writer  of  sportive  verse,  amusing  enough 
in  their  proper  domain,  are  felt  to  be  here 
grievously  out  of  place. 

Though  Death  may  be  approached  humor- 
ously, as  in  Shirley's  magnificent  song,  he  can- 
not without  offence  be  approached  with  the 
mincing  steps  of  the  dancing-master.  The 
moment  that,  in  the  first  stanza,  the  serious 
attention  of  the  reader  has  been  arrested  upon 
the  greatest  of  all  subjects,  Death's  omnipotence, 
he  naturally  expects,  even  underneath  the 
poet's  humour,  grave  and  solemn  "  thoughts  to 
their  own  music  chanted." 

Sincerity,  in  a  word,  is  what  he  looks  for  now, 
not  all  this  ingenuity  of  the  mere  rhyming  acro- 
bat. To  say  that  all  the  ingenious  manipulations 
of  the  fifty-one  lines  that  follow  the  first  stanza 
are  lost  upon  the  reader  is  r^ot  to  say  nearly 
enough  ;  they  are  resented  by  the  only  readers 
whom  it  was  worth  while  to  please — resented 
as  an  impertinence. 


VIII 

ETHICAL  POETRY 

WE  have  now  to  turn  to  a  very 
important  branch  of  the  subject, 
that  is,  ethical  poetry. 
Art  has  her  two  great  fountains 
of  pleasure  quite  distinct  from  each  other ;  one  the 
pleasure  of  mere  representation  ;  the  other  the 
pleasure  of  symbol  and  ethical  motif.  If  a  poet  will 
give  us  a  beautiful  picture  of  any  beautiful 
fragment  of  the  varied  tapestry  of  life,  he 
delights  us.  And,  from  this  point  of  view, 
George  Sand  was  right  when  she  said  that 
"  1'Art  n'est  qu'une  forme  "  ;  and  Goethe  was 
right  when  he  said  that  art  is  representation. 
If  on  the  other  hand,  he  incarnates  beautifully 
abstract  ideas  that  are  beautiful,  he  delights  us. 
And,  from  this  point  of  view,  Zoroaster  was 
right  when  he  denned  poetry  to  be  "  apparent 
pictures  of  unapparent  realities."  But,  always, 
the  one  thing  in  art  is  that  the  artist  should  do 
that  which  he  pretends  to  do.  If  he  pretends  to 
represent,  he  must  sacrifice  all  or  most  things 
to  the  representation.  If  he  pretends  to  sym- 
bolize, he  must  sacrifice  all  or  most  things  to  the 
symbol. 

Although  there  is  noble  ethical  poetry  in  the 

215 


216  POETRY 

Western  world  its  home  is  in  the  East,  where  the 
doctrine  of  Karma  prevails — the  greatest  doc- 
trine in  all  ethical  systems.  Karma  is  that 
inherent  force  in  every  action  which,  by  a  law 
of  scientific  necessity  superior  to  all  other 
powers,  brings  about  the  good  or  evil  conse- 
quences latent  in  the  action's  very  essence. 
Eastern  poetry  is  full  of  it  to  the  very  brim. 
From  what  we  have  said  before  in  discussing 
the  Epic  and  the  Great  Lyric,  it  may  perhaps  be 
inferred  that  the  greatest  ethical  poetry  in  the 
world  is  Hebraic.  This,  however,  would  be  a 
mistake.  The  greatest  ethical  poetry,  it  would 
seem,  is  either  Sufistic  or  Buddhistic. 

Buddhism  has  existed  for  something  like 
twenty-four  centuries.  In  the  area  of  its 
prevalence — stretching  from  Ceylon  and  Japan 
to  Siberia  and  Swedish  Lapland — it  surpasses 
all  other  creeds,  as  it  surpasses  them  all  in 
the  number  of  its  followers,  comprising  as  these 
do  more  than  a  third  of  the  entire  human  race. 
Yet  as  regards  the  doctrine  of  self-abnegation 
the  fundamental  difference  between  it  and  all 
other  systems  save  sufism  has  not  been  clearly 
pointed  out.  And  the  fact  is  remarkable  if  we 
remember  the  considerable  amount  of  attention 
that  has  been  given  in  Europe  to  Buddhism 
since  the  publication  of  Eugene  Burnouf's 
"  Introduction  to  the  History  of  Buddhism  "  in 
1844.  Up  to  that  time,  owing  perhaps  to  its 
having  almost  died  out  in  India,  the  cradle 
of  its  birth,  the  most  ignorant  notions  were 
prevalent  concerning  it,  while  Brahmanism  was 
a  familiar  subject  even  in  popular  literature. 


ETHICAL   POETRY  217 

It  is  true,  no  doubt,  as  the  French  Orientalists 
have  pointed  out,  that  it  is  in  the  preaching  of 
benevolence  that  Buddhism  is  affined  to  Chris- 
tianity. But  note  the  difference  between  these 
two  benevolent  systems :  Christianity  enjoins 
benevolence  because  there  is  a  Ruler  who 
(notwithstanding  Evil  aud  its  impeachment)  is 
a  benevolent,  and,  at  the  same  time,  an  omnis- 
cient and  omnipotent  God.  Buddhism,  like 
European  Paganism,  knows  no  such  benevolent 
God,  but  it  enjoins  benevolence  none  the  less — 
enjoins  it,  indeed,  because  it  knows  no  benevolent 
God.  The  Buddhistic  thinker  exclaims,  "  There 
is  none  in  the  skies  to  love  and  watch  over  you, 
therefore  love  and  watch  over  one  another." 
And  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  sufi  poets. 
It  is  more  than  a  thousand  years  ago  since  a 
certain  saintly  woman  Rabi'a  uttered  this 
sublime  prayer  : — 

"  Oh  God,  if  I  worship  Thee  in  fear  of  Hell,  burn  me  in 
Hell ;  and  if  I  worship  Thee  in  hope  of  Paradise,  exclude 
me  from  Paradise  ;  but  if  I  worship  Thee  for  Thine  own 
sake,  withhold  not  Thine  everlasting  beauty." 

If  we  compare  these  two  systems  with  European 
Paganism  the  contrast  is  very  striking. 

"  We  are  quite  ready,"  says  the  human  race, 
under  the  teaching  of  Paganism — under  the 
teaching  of  all  systems  except  the  Christian 
sufistic  and  the  Buddhistic — "  to  be  benevolent, 
to  practise  all  virtues,  to  be  tender  of  life,  to 
be  pitiful  in  suffering — to  be  very  good,  in 
short  :  "  que  messieurs  les  dieux  commencent." 

But  sympathizing  profoundly  as  Buddhism 


218  POETRY 

would  do  with  the  Greek  mind,  if  it  believed 
in  a  God  at  all,  in  that  apprehension  of  the 
cruel  indifference  of  the  gods  which  runs  through 
Greek  literature,  and  which  Tennyson  has  so 
admirably  rendered  in  the  "  Lotos-Eaters,"  the 
temper  with  which  Buddhism  meets  that  in- 
difference is  the  very  opposite  of  the  Greek 
temper,  as  expressed  not  more  clearly  in  the 
Titanic  impeachments  of  ^Eschylus  than  in  the 
lofty  ethical  moods  of  Epictetus,  of  Marcus 
Aurelius,  and  of  those  other  stoics  who  incul- 
cate benevolence  as  a  means  of  self-culture. 
For  the  Buddhistic  temper  is  precisely  that 
with  which  Christianity  meets  the  paternal 
guardianship  of  a  benevolent  God. 

The  Western  mind  seems  quite  unable  to 
understand  the  Oriental  doctrine  of  Karma 
described  above. 

The  Hindoo  doctrine  that  he  who  is  kind  to 
the  lower  animals  enjoys  in  the  next  world,  as 
Mann  says  "  bliss  without  end,"  is  one  of  the 
most  favourite  subjects  always  with  the  Eastern 
poets  and  moralists.  The  object  with  these  has 
been  to  enunciate  an  ethical  truth,  not  to  use 
an  ethical  truth  as  an  added  ornament  to  a 
brilliant  piece  of  writing,  as  mostly  in  Western 
poetry.  The  writer  of  that  very  remarkable 
Pahlavi  M.S.  (published  in  1872  in  Bombay,  and 
London)  Arda  Viraf,  gives  us  the  vision  of  a 
man  whose  body — all  but  the  right  foot — was 
being  gnawed  in  hell  by  a  noxious  creature 
without  a  name.  He  was  a  sluggard  who,  when 
living,  would  not  work,  but  who  had  once,  with 
the  right  foot,  kicked  a  bundle  of  grass  before 


ETHICAL   POETRY  219 

the  mouth  of  a  hungry  ox  at  plough.  Here  we 
get  a  perfect  ethical  lesson  taught  by  a  perfect 
symbol. 

Take  again  Buddhagosha.  When  he  would 
teach  the  lesson  of  the  universality  of  sorrow 
and  death — he  simply  tells  us  the  story  of  the 
weeping  girl  Kisogatami,  who,  on  being  told 
by  the  prophet  she  has  applied  to  for  help  that 
he  could  make  a  medicine  to  restore  her  child's 
dead  body  to  life  if  she  could  bring  him  a  handful 
of  mustard-seed  from  a  house  where  no  beloved 
one  had  died — went  from  house  to  house 
begging  what  no  one  could  give  her  ;  for,  alas ! 
11  few  are  the  living,  but  the  dead  are  many." 

Here,  be  sure,  the  concrete  form  succeeded 
the  abstract  idea,  and  was,  indeed,  born  of  it. 
Not  that  there  is  any  reason  why  a  poem,  or  a 
group  of  poems,  should  be  the  embodiment  of 
an  ethical  or  philosophical  idea. 

The  method  of  work  of  the  Western  poets 
seems  to  be  the  opposite  of  that  of  the  great 
Eastern  masters  of  Ethical  poetry,  whether 
Buddhistic,  or  Mohammedan.  It  seems  im- 
possible to  them  not  to  imagine  a  striking 
situation  first,  and,  having  rendered  it,  look 
around  for  some  philosophical  doctrine  of  which 
it  may  be  used  as  a  symbol ;  whereas  with  those 
whose  temperaments  impel  them  to  look  out 
upon  Nature  not  for  the  pictures  as  they  do — not 
for  sensational  situations  as  they  do — but  for 
symbols,  the  ethical  motif  comes  first,  the 
picture  afterwards.  And — what  is  really  in- 
explicable, is  that  even  when  the  Western  poet 
does  start  with  the  motif  first  —which  is  very 


220  POETRY 

rarely — he  seems  at  once  to  lose  all  his  imagina- 
tion— he  cannot  give  it  imaginative  form  at  all 
— but  takes  the  poem  right  away  from  human 
sympathy  by  bringing  in  the  cold  machinery  of 
fancy. 

For  instance,  so  great  a  Western  poet  as 
Victor  Hugo  can  find  it  in  his  heart  to  travesty 
thus  the  beautiful  Eastern  symbols  of  Karma. 
To  be  striking  is  Hugo's  first  function.  He 
describes  in  language  which  for  vigour  is  quite 
unmatched  in  French  poetry,  Sultan  Mourad,  a 
monster  compared  with  whom  Genghis  Khan 
was  tender — a  friend,  who  among  other  exploits, 
strangled  his  eight  brothers ;  disembowelled  a 
dozen  children  to  find  a  lost  apple ;  sawed  his 
uncle  into  sandwiches  between  two  cedar  planks, 
burnt  a  hundred  Christian  convents ;  built 
twenty-thousand  prisoners  of  war  into  a  stone 
wall,  to  avenge  an  uncivil  message  received 
from  his  enemy ;  and  who,  when  he  comes, 
after  death,  to  be  tried  at  the  bar  of  God,  is 
pardoned  all  his  cruelties,  and  enjoys  the 
promised  "  bliss  without  end,"  because  once 
the  whim  had  seized  him  to  drive  away  the  flies 
that  were  teasing  a  dying  pig.  And  there  in 
heaven  is  the  grotesque  picture  of  pig  and 
Dieu  having  a  discussion  on  the  subject,  a 
discussion  which  ends  by  the  pig  and  the  victims 
being  weighed  in  a  balance,  the  pig  outweighing 
the  human  victims. 

There  are  in  the  Western  world  a  few  poets 
only — and  these  include  poets  like  Sophocles, 
Shakespeare,  Burns,  Tennyson,  Browning — who 
seem  to  feel  the  real  pathos  of  human  life  as  a 


ETHICAL   POETRY  221 

whole.  Many  can  feel,  and  more  can  express 
the  fire  of  personal  passion ;  at  least,  they  can 
thrill  us  intensely  with  the  cries  of  an  individual 
soul  in  its  supreme  ecstasy  of  joy  or  pain. 

But  only  a  few  among  Western  poets  realise 
the  unutterable  pathos  of  the  tangled  web  of 
human  life  as  a  whole  ;  a  few  only  see  clearly 
what  a  pathetic  thing  it  is  to  live  and  die, 
surrounded  by  myriads  of  others  who  live  and 
die — "  to  be  here  " — as  Corporal  Trim  says, 
"  to-day  and  gone  to-morrow  " — to  come  we 
know  not  whence,  fluttering  for  a  day  or  two 
"  in  the  sunshine  and  the  rain,"  to  leave  it  and 
go  we  know  not  whither ;  to  feel  that  our 
affections,  however  deep,  our  loves,  however 
passionate,  are  twined  around  beings  whose 
passage  is  more  evanescent  than  "  the  flight  of 
the  swift  bird  across  the  sky " — nay,  more 
fleeting  (as  the  Talmud  says)  than  "  the  shadow 
along  the  grass  of  the  bird  as  it  flies  " — beings 
dearer  to  us  nevertheless  than  our  hearts'  blood  ; 
and  dearer  still  for  this,  that  when  they  leave 
us  we  know  we  shall  never  see  them  any  more 
as  they  are  now,  and  half  dread  that  we  may 
never  see  them  any  more  at  all. 

Along  with  lyric  intensity  at  its  greatest 
this  feeling  is  not  found,  and  the  reason  is 
obvious. 

All  Art  is, — if  we  search  deep  enough, — an 
expression  of  an  egoism  stronger  and  more  vital 
than  common — an  egoism  too  strong  to  be 
content  to  "  die  without  sign  "  ;  but  lyric  art  is 
egoism's  very  self.  "  I  enjoy — I  suffer  "  ;  this, 
from  Sappho  downwards,  has  been  the  motif 


222  POETRY 

of  all  the  very  finest  lyric  music.  The  lyrist, 
it  is  true,  "  learns  in  suffering  what  he  teaches 
in  song  "  ;  but  he  has  learned  nothing  but  the 
poignancy  of  his  own  joys  and  woes, — "  Son 
ceur  est  un  luth  suspendu  si  tot  qu'on  le 
touche  il  resonne." 

Of  the  pathos  of  the  human  drama  as  a  con- 
ception the  Western  poet  generally  knows 
nothing  save  of  that  one  little  part. 

In  order  to  feel  that  deep  pathetic  mean- 
ing of  human  life  that  we  have  been  speaking 
of,  a  poet  must  have  done  something  more  than 
feel  his  own  joys  and  woes ;  and  he  must  have 
done  something  more  than  sit  in  his  chamber 
weaving  the  high  fancies  of  his  soul,  as  the 
pageantry  of  life  goes  by.  He  must  be  able 
to  say,  as  Voltaire  said,  with  pardonable  boast- 
fulness — "  At  least,  I  have  lived."  If  he  has 
been  "  cradled  into  poetry  by  wrong  "  he  must 
have  learned  therefrom  something  more  than 
the  trick  of  bemoaning  it.  He  must  not  only 
have  "  loved  his  beautiful  lady  "  ;  he  must  also, 
like  the  Knight  of  Beauvais,  have  "  loved  much 
to  listen  to  the  music  of  beauteous  ladies."  He 
must  not  only  have  "  greatly  loved  his  friend, 
he  must  also  have  had  his  sweet  enemies  and. 

"Drunk  delight  of  battle  with  his  peers." 

Above  all,  he  must  have  had  the  rare  faculty 
of  enjoying,  through  sympathy,  the  perennial 
freshness  of  human  youth. 

Every-day  life,  which  rhymsters  call  prosaic 
and  flee  from,  is  not  prosaic  to  him,  but  a 


ETHICAL   POETRY  223 

romance ;  and  his  love  of  man  becomes  in- 
tensified by  the  very  thought  of  the  evanescence 
of  man's  life  ;  as  the  preciousness  of  a  vase, 
says  Pliny,  is  intensified  by  the  thought  of  its 
fragility. 


IX 

THE  SONG  AND  THE  ELEGY 

A  WORD  or  two  must  be  said  here  about 
the  song  and  the  elegy.    To   write 
a    good    song    requires    that    sim- 
plicity   of     grammatical    structure 
which  is  foreign  to  many  natures — that  mastery 
over  direct  and  simple  speech  which  only  true 
passion  and  feeling  can  give,  and  which  "  coming 
from  the  heart  goes  to  the  heart."     Without 
going  so  far  as  to  say  that  no  man  is  a  poet 
who  cannot  write  a  good  song,  it  may  certainly 
be  said  that  no  man  can  write  a  good  song  who 
is  not  a  good  poet. 

The  motif — sentimental,  patriotic,  or  pas- 
sionate— which  starts  any  song  should  run 
simply  down  to  the  last  line.  Otherwise,  indeed, 
the  composition  almost  ceases  to  be  a  song  in 
the  modern  sense  of  the  word,  and  becomes  an 
ode — an  ode  not  only  as  the  word  was  under- 
stood by  the  Greeks,  but  as  it  was  understood 
by  Horace,  and  in  still  later  times  by  Coleridge, 
Shelley,  and  Keats.  This  oneness  of  motif, 
which  is  the  fundamental  characteristic  of  the 

224 


SONG   AND   THE   ELEGY          225 

song,  goes  far,  perhaps,  to  explain  the  fact  that 
in  most  songs  the  really  vital  portion  consists 
of  but  one  stanza — often  the  first — from  which 
the  remainder  of  the  lyric  hangs  as  a  mere 
fringe.  Among  the  exquisite  song-writers  of 
the  seventeenth  century  Shakespeare  was  one 
of  those  who  knew  when  to  stop  after  the 
motif  had  been  fully  expressed ;  for  it  must  be 
remembered  that  the  second  stanza,  which  mars 
the  divine  song  in  '  Measure  for  Measure/ 
"  Take,  oh,  take  those  lips  away,"  is  not  Shakes- 
peare's at  all,  but  Fletcher's.  After  Shakes- 
peare's time,  however,  some  of  the  best  English 
songs  written  until  Tennyson  rose  have  been 
the  work  of  those  who  are  called  "  minor  poets  " 
— that  is  to  say,  poets  who  have  made  no  attempt 
to  "  build  the  lofty  rhyme,"  while  often  those 
who  have  indulged  in  that  risky  kind  of  archi- 
tecture have  only  partially  succeeded  in  the 
humbler  efforts  of  the  song-writer.  When  a 
large  body  of  the  poetic  stream  is  at  the  com- 
mand of  the  writer,  the  very  magnitude  of  the 
forces  at  work  perhaps  makes  it  difficult  for  him 
to  restrain  them  for  the  single  expression  of  a 
single  motif.  But  even  unity  of  motif  is  not 
enough  to  lend  full  vitality  to  a  song.  Extreme 
brevity  of  structure  is  a  primary  requisite  even 
where  the  motif  has  not  been  departed  from. 
To  all  forms  of  literary  art  Voltaire's  maxim 
applies,  that  the  most  effective  way  to  weary 
the  listener  is  to  say  all  that  can  be  said  upon  a 
subject ;  but  this  volubility  is  destructive  of  the 
very  existence  of  the  song. 

In  a  word,  it  is  here  that  is  seen  more  clearly 


226  POETRY 

than  in  any  other  department  of  poetic  art  the 
imperious  truth  of  Hesiod's  saying  that  the 
half  is  better  than  the  whole  ;  it  is  here  that 
literary  self-indulgence — always  more  or  less 
injurious  to  literary  art — is  seen  to  be  fatal. 
This  could  easily  be  made  manifest,  if  it  were 
worth  while  to  instance  any  one  of  those  fine 
but  half-forgotten  lyrics  of  our  time,  which 
nothing  would  have  prevented  from  passing 
into  universal  acceptance  had  not  the  poet's 
embarrassment  of  wealth  tempted  him  into 
saying  everything  that  could  be  said  upon  the 
subject  in  hand. 

If  brevity  is  the  soul  of  song-writing  as  of 
wit,  those  "  short  odes  "  of  the  Japanese  poets, 
for  a  knowledge  of  which  English  readers  are 
indebted  to  Mr.  Chamberlain,  are  "  twice 
blessed,"  blessing  him  that  gives  and  him  that 
takes.  Love  as  a  sentiment  rather  than  Love 
as  a  passion  inspires  most  successful  song- 
writers. 

In  modern  times  we  have,  of  course,  nothing 
in  any  way  representing  those  choral  dance- 
songs  of  the  Greeks,  which,  originating  in  the 
primitive  Cretan  war-dances,  became  in  Pindar's 
time,  a  splendid  blending  of  song  and  ballet. 
Nor  have  we  anything  exactly  representing  the 
Greek  scolia,  those  short  drinking  songs  of 
which  Terpander  is  said  to  have  been  the 
inventor.  That  these  scolia  were  written,  not 
only  by  poets,  like  Aleaeus,  Anacreon,  Praxilla, 


SONG   AND   THE   ELEGY          227 

Simonides,  but  also  by  Sappho,  and  by  Pindar 
shows  in  what  high  esteem  they  were  held  by 
the  Greeks.  These  songs  seem  to  have  been  as 
brief  as  the  stornelli  of  the  Italian  peasant. 
They  were  accompanied  by  the  lyre,  which  was 
handed  from  singer  to  singer  as  the  time  for 
each  scolion  came  round. 

With  regard  to  the  stornello,  many  critics 
seem  to  confound  it  with  the  rispetto,  a  very 
different  kind  of  song.  The  Italian  rispetto 
consists  of  a  stanza  of  inter-rhyming  lines 
ranging  from  six  to  ten  in  number,  but  often 
not  exceeding  eight.  The  Tuscan  and  Umbrian 
stornello  is  much  shorter  consisting,  indeed,  of  a 
hemistich,  naming  some  natural  object  which 
suggests  the  motive  of  the  little  poem. 

The  nearest  approach  to  the  Italian  stornello 
appears  to  be  not  the  rispetto,  but  the  Welsh 
triban. 

Perhaps  the  mere  difficulty  of  rhyming  in 
English  and  the  facility  of  rhyming  in  Italian 
must  be  taken  into  account  when  we  inquire 
why  there  is  nothing  in  Scotland — of  course 
there  could  be  nothing  in  England — answering 
to  the  nature-poetry  of  the  Italian  peasant. 
Most  of  the  Italian  rispetti  and  stornelli  seem 
to  be  improvisations ;  and  to  improvise  in 


228  POETRY 

English  is  as  difficult  as  to  improvise  is  easy  in 
Italian.  Nothing,  indeed,  is  more  interesting 
than  the  improvisatorial  poetry  of  the  Italian 
peasants,  such  as  the  canzone.  If  the  peasantry 
discover  who  is  the  composer  of  a  canzone, 
they  will  not  sing  it.  The  speciality  of  Italian 
peasant  poetry  is  that  the  symbol  which  is 
mostly  erotic  is  of  the  purest  and  most  tender 
kind.  A  peasant  girl  will  improvise  a  song  as 
impassioned  as  "  Come  into  the  Garden,  Maud," 
and  as  free  from  unwholesome  taint. 

With  regard  to  English  songs,  the  critic 
cannot  but  ask — Wherein  lies  the  lost  ring  and 
charm  of  the  Elizabethan  song-writers  ?  Since 
the  Jacobean  period  at  least, few  have  succeeded 
in  the  art  of  writing  real  songs  as  distinguished 
from  mere  book-lyrics.  Between  songs  to  be 
sung  and  songs  to  be  read  there  is  in  our  time  a 
difference  as  wide  as  that  which  exists  between 
plays  for  the  closet  and  plays  for  the  boards. 

Heartiness  and  melody,  the  two  requisites  of 
a  song  which  can  never  be  dispensed  with — can 
rarely  be  compassed,  it  seems,  by  one  and  the 
same  individual.  In  both  these  qualities  the 
Elizabethan  poets  stand  pre-eminent,  though 
even  with  them  the  melody  is  not  so  singable 
as  it  might  be  made.  Since  their  time  hearti- 


SONG   AND   THE   ELEGY          229 

ness  has,  perhaps,  been  a  Scottish,  rather  than 
an  English  endowment  of  the  song-writer.  It 
is  difficult  to  imagine  an  Englishman  writing  a 
song  like  "  Tullochgorum "  or  a  song  like 
"  Maggie  Lauder,"  where  the  heartiness  and 
impulse  of  the  poet's  mood  conquer  all  im- 
pediments of  close  vowels  and  rugged  con- 
sonantal combinations.  Of  Scottish  song- 
writers Burns  is,  of  course,  the  head ;  for  the 
songs  of  John  Skinner,  the  heartiest  song- 
writer that  has  appeared  in  Great  Britain  (not 
excluding  Herrick),  are  too  few  in  number  to 
entitle  him  to  be  placed  beside  a  poet  so  prolific 
in  heartiness  and  melody  as  Burns.  With 
regard  to  Campbell's  heartiness,  this  is  quite  a 
different  quality  from  the  heartiness  of  Burns 
and  Skinner,  and  is  in  quality  English  rather 
than  Scottish,  though,  no  doubt,  it  is  of  a  fine 
and  rare  strain,  especially  in  "  The  Battle  of  the 
Baltic."  His  songs  illustrate  an  infirmity,  which 
even  the  Scottish  song-writers  share  with  the 
English — a  defective  sense  of  that  true  song- 
warble,  which  we  get  in  the  stornelli  and  rispetti 
of  the  Italian  peasants.  A  poet  may  have 
heartiness  in  plenty,  but  if  he  has  that  love  of 
consonantal  effects  which  Donne  displays,  he 
will  never  write  a  first-rate  song.  Here,  indeed, 


230  POETRY 

is  the  crowning  difficulty  of  song-writing.  An 
extreme  simplicity  of  structure  and  of  diction 
must  be  accompanied  by  an  instinctive  appre- 
hension of  the  melodic  capabilities  of  verbal 
sounds,  and  of  what  Samuel  Lover,  the  Irish 
song- writer,  called  "  singing  "  words,  which  is 
rare  in  this  country,  and  seems  to  belong  to  the 
Celtic  rather  than  to  the  Saxon  ear.  "  The 
song-writer,"  says  Lover,  "  must  frame  his  song 
of  open  vowels  with  as  few  guttural  or  hissing 
sounds  as  possible,  and  he  must  be  content 
sometimes  to  sacrifice  grandeur  and  vigour  to 
the  necessity  of  selecting  singing  words  and  not 
reading  words."  And  he  exemplifies  the  dis- 
tinction between  singing  words  and  reading 
words  by  a  line  from  one  of  Shelley's  songs— 

"  The    fresh    earth    in    new    leaves    drest." 

"  where  nearly  every  word  shuts  up  the  mouth 
instead  of  opening  it."  But  closeness  of  vowel 
sounds  is  by  no  means  the  only  thing  to  be 
avoided  in  song-writing.  A  phrase  may  be 
absolutely  unsingable  though  the  vowels  be  open 
enough,  if  it  is  loaded  with  consonants.  The 
truth  is  that  in  song-writing  it  is  quite  as 
important,  in  a  consonantal  language  like  ours, 
to  attend  to  the  consonants  as  to  the  vowels ; 


SONG  AND   THE  ELEGY          231 

and  perhaps  the  first  thing  to  avoid  in  writing 
English  songs  is  the  frequent  recurrence  of  the 
sibilant.  But  this  applies  to  all  the  brief  and 
quintessential  forms  of  poetry,  such  as  the 
sonnet,  the  elegy,  &c. 

As  to  the  elegy — a  form  of  poetic  art  which 
has  more  relation  to  the  objects  of  the  external 
world  than  the  song,  but  less  relation  to  these 
than  the  stornello — its  scope  seems  to  be  wide 
indeed,  as  practised  by  such  various  writers  as 
Tyrtaeus,  Theognis,  Catullus,  Tibullus,  and  our 
own  Gray.  It  may  almost  be  said  that  per- 
fection of  form  is  more  necessary  here  and  in  the 
sonnet  than  in  the  song,  inasmuch  as  the  artistic 
pretensions  are  more  pronounced.  Hence  even 
such  apparent  minutiae  as  those  we  have  hinted 
at  above  must  not  be  neglected  here. 

We  have  quoted  Dionysius  of  Halicarnassus 
in  relation  to  the  arrangement  of  words  in 
poetry.  His  remarks  on  sibilants  are  equally 
deserving  of  attention.  He  goes  so  far  as  to  say 
that  a-  is  entirely  disagreeable,  and  when  it  often 
recurs,  insupportable.  The  hiss  seems  to  him 
to  be  more  appropriate  to  the  beast  than  to  man. 
Hence  certain  writers,  he  says,  often  avoid  it, 
and  employ  it  with  regret.  Some,  he  tells  us, 
have  composed  entire  odes  without  it.  But  if 


232  POETRY 

sibilation  is  a  defect  in  Greek  odes,  where  the 
softening  effect  of  the  vowel  sounds  is  so  potent, 
it  is  much  more  so  in  English  poetry,  where  the 
consonants  dominate,  though  it  will  be  only 
specially  noticeable  in  the  brief  and  quin- 
tessential forms  such  as  the  song,  the  sonnet, 
the  elegy.  Many  poets  only  attend  to  their 
sibilants  when  these  clog  the  rhythm.  To  write 
even  the  briefest  song  without  a  sibilant  would 
be  a  tour  de  force  ;  to  write  a  good  one  would  no 
doubt  be  next  to  impossible.  It  is  singular 
that  the  only  metricist  who  ever  attempted  it 
was  John  Thelwall,  the  famous  "  Citizen  John," 
friend  of  Lamb  and  Coleridge,  and  editor  of  the 
famous  Champion  newspaper,  where  many  of 
Lamb's  epigrams  appeared.  Thelwall  gave 
much  attention  to  metrical  questions,  and  tried 
his  hand  at  various  metres.  Though  "  Citizen 
John's "  saphics  might  certainly  have  been 
better,  he  had  a  very  remarkable  critical  in- 
sight into  the  rationale  of  metrical  effects,  and 
his  "  Song  without  a  sibilant "  is  extremely 
neat  and  ingenious.  Of  course,  however,  it 
would  be  mere  pedantry  to  exaggerate  this 
objection  to  sibilants,  even  in  these  brief  forms 
of  poetry. 


THE  RENASCENCE  OF  WONDER 
IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


THE  RENASCENCE  OF  WONDER  IN 
ENGLISH  POETRY 

PART  I 

IN  the  preceding  treatise  on    poetry  first 
principles  have  been  discussed  with  but 
little  reference  to  the  historic  method  of 
criticism.     This  essay,  on  the  contrary, 
will  be  entirely  historical :  it  will  consist  of  a 
survey  of  the  revival  in  England  at  the  end  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  and  the  beginning  of  the 
nineteenth  of  the  romantic  temper — that  temper 
without    which    English    poetry    can    scarcely 
perhaps  hold  a  place  at  all  when  challenged  in 
a  court  of  universal  criticism. 

Had  this  great  change  been  a  revolution  in 
artistic  methods  merely,  it  would  still  have  been 
the  most  important  change  in  the  history  of 
English  literature.  But  it  affected  the  very  soul 
of  poetry.  It  had  two  sides  ;  one  side  concerned 
that  of  poetic  methods,  and  one  that  of  poetic 
energy.  It  was  partly  realistic  as  seen  in 
Wordsworth's  portion  of  the  Lyrical  Ballads, 

235 


236  THE   RENASCENCE 

and  partly  imaginative  as  seen  in  Coleridge's 
portion  of  that  incongruous  but  epoch-making 
book.  As  the  movement  substituted  for  the 
didactic  materialism  of  the  eighteenth  century 
a  new  temper — or,  rather,  the  revival  of  an  old 
temper  which  to  all  appearance  was  dead — it 
has  been  called  the  Romantic  Revival.  The 
French  Revolution  is  generally  credited,  by 
French  writers  at  least,  with  having  been  the 
prime  factor  in  this  change.  Now,  beyond 
doubt,  the  French  Revolution,  the  mightiest 
social  convulsion  recorded  in  the  history  of  the 
world,  was  accompanied  in  France  by  such 
romantic  poetry  as  that  of  Andre  Chenier,  and 
was  followed,  many  years  afterwards,  by  the 
work  of  writers  like  Dumas,  Victor  Hugo,  and 
others,  until  at  last  the  bastard  classicism  of 
the  age  of  Louis  XIV.  was  entirely  overthrown. 
In  Germany,  too,  the  French  Revolution 
stimulated  the  poetry  of  Goethe  and  Schiller, 
and  the  prose  of  Novalis,  Tieck,  and  F.  Schlegel. 
And  in  England  it  stimulated,  though  it  did  not 
originate,  the  romanticism  of  Scott,  Coleridge, 
Wordsworth,  Byron,  Shelley,  and  Keats.  But 
in  this,  as  in  so  many  matters,  while  other 
countries  have  had  the  credit  of  taking  the  lead 
in  the  great  human  march,  the  English  race  has 


OF  WONDER  237 

really  been  in  the  van.  Just  as  Cromwell  and 
Washington  preceded,  and  were  perhaps  the 
main  cause  of  Mirabeau  and  Danton,  so  Chat- 
terton,  Burns,  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Shelley, 
Keats,  and  Byron  preceded,  and  were  the  cause 
of  the  romantic  furore  in  France  which,  later  on, 
was  decided  by  the  great  battle  of  Hernani. 
As  the  storm-wind  is  the  cause,  and  not  the 
effect  of  the  mighty  billows  at  sea,  so  the 
movement  in  question  was  the  cause,  and  not 
the  effect  of  the  French  Revolution.  What  was 
this  movement  ?  It  was  nothing  less  than  a 
great  revived  stirring  of  the  slumbering  move- 
ment of  the  soul  of  man,  after  a  long  period  of 
prosaic  acceptance  in  all  things,  including 
literature  and  art. 

To  this  revival  the  present  writer,  in  the  in- 
troduction to  an  imaginative  work  dealing  with 
this  movement,  has  already  for  convenience' 
sake,  and  in  default  of  a  better  one,  given  the 
name  of  the  Renascence  of  Wonder.  As  was 
said  on  that  occasion,  '  The  phrase,  the  Re- 
nascence of  Wonder,  merely  indicates  that 
there  are  two  great  impulses  governing  man,  and 
probably  not  man  only,  but  the  entire  world  of 
conscious  life ;  the  impulse  of  acceptance — the 
impulse  to  take  unchallenged  and  for  granted 


238  THE   RENASCENCE 

all  the  phenomena  of  the  outer  world  as  they 
are — and  the  impulse  to  confront  these  pheno- 
mena with  eyes  of  inquiry  and  wonder.'  In 
order,  however,  to  explain  the  phrase  fully  it  is 
necessary  to  postpone  the  discussion  of  the 
Lyrical  Ballads  until  we  have  made  a  rapid 
sweep  over  the  antecedent  methods  and  the 
antecedent  thought  which  prepared  the  way  for 
the  book. 

It  would  seem  that  something  works  as 
inevitably  and  as  logically  as  a  physical  law 
in  the  yearning  which  societies  in  a  certain 
stage  of  development  show  to  get  away — as 
far  away  as  possible — from  the  condition  of  the 
natural  man  ;  to  get  away  from  that  despised 
condition  not  only  in  material  affairs,  such  as 
dress,  domestic  arrangements  and  economies, 
but  also  in  the  fine  arts  and  in  intellectual 
methods,  till,  having  passed  that  inevitable 
stage,  each  society  is  liable  to  suffer  (even  if 
it  does  not  in  some  cases  actually  suffer)  re- 
action, when  nature  and  art  are  likely  again 
to  take  the  place  of  convention  and  artifice. 

Anthropologists  have  often  asked,  what  was 
that  lever-power  lying  enfolded  in  the  dark 
womb  of  some  remote  semi-human  brain  which, 
by  first  stirring,  lifting,  and  vitalising  other 


OF   WONDER  239 

potential  and  latent  faculties,  gave  birth  to  man. 
Would  it  be  rash  to  assume  that  this  lever-power 
was  a  vigorous  movement  of  the  faculty  of 
wonder  ?  But  certainly  it  is  not  rash  to  affirm 
as  regards  the  races  of  man,  that  the  more  in- 
telligent the  race  the  less  it  is  governed  by  the 
instinct  of  acceptance,  and  the  more  it  is  gov- 
erned by  the  instinct  of  wonder — that  instinct 
which  leads  to  the  movement  of  challenge. 
The  alternate  action  of  the  two  great  warring 
instincts  is  specially  seen  in  the  Japanese. 
Here  the  instinct  of  challenge  which  results  in 
progress  became  active  up  to  a  certain  point  and 
then  suddenly  became  arrested,  leaving  the 
instinct  of  acceptance  to  have  full  play,  and 
then  everything  became  crystallised.  Ages  upon 
ages  of  an  immense  activity  of  the  instinct  of 
challenge  were  required  before  the  Mongolian 
savage  was  developed  into  the  Japanese  of  the 
period  before  the  nature-worship  of  "  Shinto  " 
had  been  assaulted  by  dogmatic  Buddhism. 
But  by  that  time  the  instinct  of  challenge  had 
resulted  in  such  a  high  state  of  civilisation  that 
acceptance  set  in,  and  there  was  an  end,  for 
the  time  being,  of  progress. 

There  is  no  room  here  to  say  even  a  few  words 
upon  other  great  revivals  in  past  times,  such, 


240  THE   RENASCENCE 

for  instance,  as  the  Jewish- Arabian  renascence 
of  the  ninth  and  tenth  centuries,  when  the 
interest  in  philosophical  speculation  which  had 
previously  been  arrested,  was  revived  ;  when 
the  old  sciences  were  revived ;  and  when  some 
modern  sciences  were  born. 

There  are,  of  course,  different  kinds  of  wonder. 
Primitive  poetry  is  full  of  wonder — the  naive 
and  eager  wonder  of  the  healthy  child.  It  is 
this  kind  of  wonder  which  makes  the  Iliad  and 
the  Odyssey  so  delightful.  The  wonder  of 
primitive  poetry  passes  as  the  primitive  con- 
ditions of  civilisation  pass.  And  then  for  the 
most  part  it  can  only  be  succeeded  by  a  very 
different  kind  of  wonder — the  wonder  aroused 
by  a  recognition  of  the  mystery  of  man's  life 
and  the  mystery  of  nature's  theatre  on  which 
the  human  drama  is  played — the  wonder,  in 
short,  of  ^Eschylus  and  Sophocles.  And  among 
the  Romans,  Virgil,  though  living  under  the 
same  kind  of  Augustan  acceptance  in  which 
Horace,  the  typical  poet  of  acceptance,  lived, 
is  full  of  this  latter  kind  of  wonder. 

Among  the  English  poets  who  preceded  the 
great  Elizabethan  epoch  there  is  no  need  to 
dwell  upon  any  poet  besides  Chaucer.  He 
stands  at  the  head  of  those  who  are  organised 


OF   WONDER  241 

to  see  more  clearly  than  we  can  ourselves  see 
the  wonder  of  the  "  world  at  hand."  Of  the 
poets  whose  wonder  is  of  the  simply  terrene 
kind,  those  whose  eyes  are  occupied  by  the 
beauty  of  the  earth  and  the  romance  of  human 
life,  he  is  the  English  king.  But  it  is  not  the 
wonder  of  Chaucer  that  is  to  be  specially  dis- 
cussed in  the  following  sentences.  It  is  the 
spiritual  wonder  which  in  our  literature  came 
afterwards.  It  is  that  kind  of  wonder  which 
filled  the  souls  of  Spenser,  of  Marlowe,  of  Shakes- 
peare, of  Webster,  of  Ford,  of  Cyril  Tourneur, 
and  of  the  old  ballads  ;  it  is  that  poetical  atti- 
tude which  the  human  mind  assumes  when 
confronting  those  unseen  powers  of  the  universe 
who,  if  they  did  not  weave  the  web  in  which 
man  finds  himself  entangled,  dominate  it.  That 
this  high  temper  should  have  passed  and  given 
place  to  a  temper  of  prosaic  acceptance  is  quite 
inexplicable,  save  by  the  theory  of  the  action 
and  reaction  of  the  two  great  warring  impulses 
alluded  to  in  the  foregoing  passage.  Perhaps 
the  difference  between  the  temper  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan period  and  the  temper  of  the  Chaucerian 
on  the  one  hand,  and  Augustanism  on  the  other, 
will  be  better  understood  by  a  brief  reference 
to  the  humour  of  the  respective  periods. 


242  THE   RENASCENCE 

There  are,  of  course,  in  all  literatures  two 
kinds  of  humour — absolute  humour  and  relative 
humour.  The  difference  between  these  is  as 
fundamental  as  that  which — as  has  been  already 
shown  in  the  essay  on  "  Poetry  "  —exists  bet- 
ween absolute  vision  and  relative  vision.  That 
a  recognition  and  an  enjoyment  of  incongruity 
is  the  basis  of  both  absolute  and  relative  humour 
is  no  doubt  true  enough  ;  but  while  in  the  case 
of  relative  humour  that  which  amuses  the 
humorist  is  the  incongruity  of  some  departure 
from  the  laws  of  convention,  in  the  case  of 
absolute  humour  it  is  the  incongruity  of  some 
departure  from  the  normal  as  fixed  by  Nature 
herself.  In  other  words,  while  relative  humour 
laughs  at  the  breach  of  the  conventional  laws 
of  man  and  the  symmetry  of  the  social  pyramid 
of  the  country  and  the  time — which  laws  and 
which  symmetry  it  accepts  as  final — absolute 
humour  sees  the  incongruity  of  these  conven- 
tional laws  and  this  pyramid  with  the  absolute 
sanction  of  Nature's  own  harmony.  It  follows 
that  in  trying  to  estimate  the  value  of  any  age's 
humour,  the  first  thing  to  consider  is  how  it 
stands  in  regard  to  absolute  humour  and  how  it 
stands  in  regard  to  relative  humour.  Was  there 
more  absolute  humour  in  the  age  of  wonder 
than  in  the  age  of  acceptance  ? 


OF    WONDER  243 

On  the  whole,  the  answer  must  be,  we  think, 
in  the  affirmative.  Chaucer's  humour  was  more 
closely  related  to  absolute  humour  than  any 
kind  of  humour  in  English  poetry  which  followed 
it  until  we  get  to  the  greatest  absolute  humor- 
ist in  English  poetry,  Burns. 

Perhaps  the  difference  between  the  temper  of 
one  period  and  another  of  English  poetry  could 
be  more  thoroughly  understood  if  we  were  to 
make  a  brief  reference  to  the  humour  of  the 
respective  periods.  For  although  humour  can 
be  expressed  as  perfectly  in  prose  as  in  poetry — 
more  perfectly,  perhaps — it  is  an  essentially 
poetical  quality,  and  may  be  conveniently  con- 
sidered in  discussing  Chaucer  in  relation  to  the 
Renascence  of  Wonder. 

The  singular  fact  in  connection  with  Chau- 
cer's humour  is  its  modernness.  The  prologue 
to  the  Canterbury  Tales  might  almost  have 
been  written  yesterday.  It  is  in  no  way  akin 
to  the  humour  of  his  contemporaries. 

There  are,  we  repeat,  in  all  literatures  two 
kinds  of  humour — absolute  humour  and  relative 
humour :  the  difference  between  these  is  as 
fundamental  as  that  which,  (as  has  just 
been  shown),  exists  between  absolute  vision  and 
relative  vision.  That  a  recognition  and  an  en- 
joyment of  incongruity  is  the  basis  of  both 
kinds  of  humour  is  no  doubt  true  enough  ;  but 
while  in  the  case  of  relative  humour  that  which 
amuses  the  humorist  is  the  incongruity  of 
some  departure  from  the  laws  of  convention, 


244  THE   RENASCENCE 

in  the  case  of  absolute  humour  it  is  the  incon- 
gruity of  some  departure  from  the  normal  as 
fixed  by  Nature  herself.  In  other  words,  while 
relative  humour  laughs  at  the  breach  of  the  con- 
ventional laws  of  man  and  the  symmetry  of 
the  social  pyramid  of  the  country  and  the  time 
— which  laws  and  which  symmetry  it  accepts  as 
fina1 — absolute  humour  sees  the  incongruity 
of  this  pyramid  itself  and  of  the  conventional 
laws  which  govern  it  with  the  deeper  sanctions 
of  what  is  supposed  to  be  Nature's  own  har- 
mony. It  follows  that  in  trying  to  estimate 
the  quality  of  any  age's  humour,  the  first  thing 
to  consider  is  how  it  stands  in  regard  to  abso- 
lute humour,  and  how  it  stands  in  regard  to 
relative  humour.  It  is  a  singular  thing  that  in 
Chaucer's  humour  we  get  but  little  of  that 
abandon  of  mirth  which  is  the  characteristic 
of  all  the  other  humour  of  his  own  time,  and  in- 
deed right  down  to  the  time  of  Rabelais.  Pan- 
tagruelism,  it  will  be  observed,  becomes  almost 
cosmic  at  times,  inasmuch  as  it  seems  to  com- 
pare the  accustomed  laws  of  the  universe  with 
some  ideal  standard  of  its  own,  or  with  that 
ideal  or  noumenal  or  spiritual  world  behind 
the  cosmic  show  that  sees  the  incongruity  of 
the  laws  of  nature  themselves. 

This  kind  of  humour  seems  to  be  based  on 
metaphysics,  while  the  humour  of  Chaucer  is 
so  far  akin  to  that  of  the  relative  humorist 
that  both  are  based  on  experience.  The 
humorist  of  this  last  mentioned  kind  is,  like 
Rabelais,  perpetually  overwhelmed  with  the 
irony  of  the  entire  game  of  human  life  irrespec- 


OF   WONDER  245 

live  of  standards,  social  or  even  terrene.  The 
temper  of  this  kind  of  humorist  is  to  laugh  the 
laugh  of  Anacharsis,  the  Scythian  philosopher, 
who,  when  jesters  were  taken  to  him,  could  not 
be  made  to  smile,  but  who  afterwards,  when  a 
monkey  was  brought  to  him,  broke  out  into  a 
fit  of  laughter  and  said  "  Now,  this  is  laughable 
by  nature,  the  other  by  art."  A  child  can 
become  a  relative  humorist,  or,  as  we  say, 
caricaturist,  by  adding  a  line  to  the  nose  of 
Wellington,  or  by  reversing  the  nose  of  the 
Venus  de  Medici.  The  absolute  humorist  has 
been  so  long  saying  to  himself,  "  What  a  whim- 
sical idea  is  the  human  nose  !  "  that  he  smiles 
the  smile  of  Anarcharsis  when  he  finds  the  child 
laughing  at  the  human  nose  turned  upside 
down.  Chaucer  had  nothing  of  the  humour  of 
the  old  Greek  who,  on  seeing  a  donkey  eat,  died 
of  a  sharp  and  sudden  recognition  of  the  humour 
of  the  bodily  functions. 

The  period  of  wonder  in  English  poetry  may 
perhaps  be  said  to  have  ended  with  Milton. 
For  Milton,  although  born  only  twenty-three 
years  before  the  first  of  the  great  poets  of  accept- 
ance, Dryden,  belongs  properly  to  the  period 
of  romantic  poetry.  He  has  no  relation  what- 
ever to  the  poetry  which  followed  Dryden,  and 
which  Dryden  received  partly  from  France  and 
partly  from  certain  contemporaries  of  the  great 
romantic  dramatists  themselves,  headed  by  Ben 
Jonson.  From  the  moment  when  Augustanism, 


246  THE   RENASCENCE 

as  it  is  called,  really  began — in  the  latter  de- 
cades of  the  seventeenth  century — the  periwig 
poetry  of  Dryden  and  Pope  crushed  out  all  the 
natural  singing  of  the  true  poets.  All  the 
periwig  poets  became  too  '  polite  '  to  be  natural. 
As  acceptance  is,  of  course,  the  parent  of 
Augustanism  or  gentility,  the  most  genteel 
character  in  the  world  is  a  Chinese  mandarin, 
to  whom  everything  is  vulgar  that  contradicts 
the  symmetry  of  the  pyramid  of  Cathay.  It 
was,  notwithstanding  certain  parts  of  Virgil's 
work,  the  characteristic  temper  of  Rome  in  the 
time  of  Horace,  as  much  as  it  was  the  temper 
of  England  in  the  time  of  Pope,  Congreve,  and 
Addison,  and  of  France  at  that  period  when  the 
blight  of  gentility  did  as  much  as  it  could  to 
stifle  the  splendid  genius  of  Corneille  and  of 
Moliere.  In  Greek  literature  the  genteel  finds 
no  place,  and  it  is  quite  proper  that  its  birth 
should  have  been  among  a  people  so  com- 
paratively vulgar  as  the  Romans  of  the  Empire. 
A  Greek  Horace  would  have  been  as  much  an 
impossibility  as  a  Greek  Racine  or  a  Greek 
Pope.  When  English  writers  in  the  eighteenth 
century  tried  to  touch  that  old  chord  of  wonder 
whose  vibrations,  as  we  have  above  suggested, 
were  the  first  movement  in  the  development 
of  man,  it  was  not  in  poetry  but  in  prose. 


OF   WONDER  247 

Yet  there  was  no  more  interesting  period  of 
English  history  than  that  in  which  Milton  and 
Dryden  lived — the  period  when  the  social 
pyramid  of  England  was  assaulted  but  not 
overturned,  nor  even  seriously  damaged,  by  the 
great  Rebellion.  This  Augustan  pyramid  of  ours 
had  all  the  symmetry  which  Blackstone  so 
much  admired  in  the  English  constitution  and 
its  laws  ;  and  when,  afterwards,  the  American 
colonies  came  to  revolt,  and  set  up  a  pyramid 
of  their  own,  it  was  on  the  Blackstonian  model. 
At  the  base — patient  as  the  tortoise  beneath  the 
elephant  in  the  Indian  cosmogony — was  the 
people,  born  to  be  the  base,  and  born  for  nothing 
else.  Resting  on  this  foundation  were  the 
middle  classes  in  their  various  strata,  each 
stratum  sharply  marked  off  from  the  others. 
Then  above  these  was  the  strictly  genteel  class, 
the  patriciate,  picturesque  and  elegant  in  dress 
if  in  nothing  else,  whose  privileges  were  theirs 
as  a  matter  of  right.  Above  the  patriciate  was 
the  earthly  source  of  gentility,  the  monarch, 
who  would,  no  doubt,  have  been  the  very  apex 
of  the  sacred  structure  save  that  a  little — a 
very  little — above  him  sat  God,  the  suzerain  to 
whom  the  prayers  even  of  the  monarch  him- 
self were  addressed. 


248  THE   RENASCENCE 

The  leaders  of  the  Rebellion  had  certainly  done 
a  daring  thing,  and  an  original  thing,  by  striking 
off  the  apex  of  this  pyramid,  and  it  might 
reasonably  have  been  expected  that  the  building 
itself  would  collapse  and  crumble  away.  But  it 
did  nothing  of  the  kind.  It  was  simply  a 
pyramid  with  the  apex  cut  off — a  structure  to 
serve  afterwards  as  a  model  of  the  American 
and  French  pyramids,  both  of  which,  though 
aspiring  to  the  original  structures,  are  really 
built  on  exactly  the  same  scheme  of  hereditary 
honour  and  dishonour  as  that  upon  which  the 
pyramids  of  Nineveh  and  Babylon  were  no 
doubt  built.  Then  came  the  Restoration  :  the 
apex  was  restored  :  the  structure  was  again 
complete ;  it  was  indeed,  more  solid  than  ever 
— stronger  than  ever. 

Subject  to  the  exception  of  certain  great  and 
glorious  prose  writers  of  that  period,  the  in- 
congruity which  struck  the  humorist  as  laugh- 
able was  incongruity  not  with  the  order  of 
nature  and  the  elemental  laws  of  man's  mind, 
but  with  the  order  of  the  Augustan  pyramid. 
It  required  the  genius  of  a  Swift  in  England, 
as  it  required  in  France  the  genius  of  a  Molie"re, 
to  produce  anything  like  the  absolute  humour 
which  had  died  out  with  Rabelais.  In  Fielding, 


OF   WONDER  349 

to  be  sure  (notably  in  Joseph  Andrews],  and  once 
in  Addison  in  the  fine  description  of  the  Tory 
Squire  in  The  Freeholder,  we  do  seem  to  get  it, 
but  in  poetry  never. 

As  to  the  old  romantic  temper  which  had 
inspired  Spenser's  Faerie  Queene,  Marlowe's 
Faustus,  Shakespeare's  Hamlet,  that  was  dead 
and  gone — seemed  dead  and  gone  for  ever. 
In  order  to  realise  how  the  instinct  of  wonder 
had  been  wiped  out  of  English  poetry  we  have 
only  to  turn  to  Dry  den's  modernisation  of 
Chaucer ;  his  translations  from  Virgil,  Boc- 
caccio, and  others  ;  and  to  Pope's  translations 
of  the  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey.  Let  us  take  first 
the  later  and  smaller  of  these  two  Augustan 
poets.  Instead  of  the  unconscious  and  un- 
literary  method  of  rendering  the  high  temper 
of  man  in  the  heroic  youth  of  the  world — man 
confronting  and  daring  the  arrows  of  Fate  and 
Chance — what  do  we  get  ?  The  artificial,  high- 
sounding  lines  of  a  writer  of  worldly  verse  whom 
nature,  no  doubt,  intended  to  be  a  poet,  but 
whom  "  Augustanism "  impelled  to  cultivate 
himself  like  a  Dutch  garden  in  order  to  become 
'  polite  '  all  round. 

That  Dryden  should  fail  as  Pope  failed  in 
catching  the  note  of  primitive  wonder  which 


250  THE   RENASCENCE 

characterises  Homer  was  to  be  expected.  But 
it  might  at  least  have  been  supposed  that  he 
would  succeed  better  with  Virgil ;  for  Virgil  was 
born  only  five  years  before  the  typical  Augustan 
poet  of  Rome,  Horace.  But  then  it  chanced 
that  Virgil  was  something  much  more  than  an 
Augustan  poet.  Nothing,  indeed,  is  more  re- 
markable in  connection  with  the  chameleon-like 
character  of  Virgil's  genius  than  the  fact  that 
in  the  laureate  of  Caesarism  and  the  flatterer  of 
Augustus  we  should  get  not  only  the  dawn  of 
modern  love — love  as  a  pure  sentiment — but  also 
that  other  romantic  note  of  wonder — get,  in  a 
word,  those  beginnings  of  mysticism  and  that 
speculative  temper  which  made  him  the  domi- 
nant figure  of  the  Middle  Ages.  To  all  these 
qualities — to  all  that  made  Bacon  call  him  the 
'  chastest  poet  and  royalist  that  to  the  memory 
of  man  is  known  ' — the  coarse,  vigorous,  ma- 
terialistic mind  of  Dryden  was  as  insensitive 
as  was  the  society  in  which  he  moved. 

And  does  he  prosper  any  better  with  his  own 
countryman,  Chaucer,  whose  splendid  poem, 
The  Knight's  Tale  he  essayed  to  modernise 
with  others  ?  Upon  the  Knight's  Tale,  based 
upon  Boccaccio's  Teseide,  Shakespeare  and  an- 
other built  one  of  the  great  dramas  of  the  modern 


OF   WONDER  251 

world,  and  so  far  from  depriving  it  of  the  charm 
of  wonder,  added  to  it  a  deeper  wonder  still 
— the  wonder  of  their  own  epoch.  This  superb 
poem  Dryden  undertook  to  make  Augustan. 
Again,  see  how  his  coarse  fingers  degraded 
Shakespeare's  Troilus  and  Cressida  when  he 
took  upon  himself  to  make  that  strange  work 
"  polite."  No  doubt  the  littleness  of  greatness 
is  the  humorous  motif  of  the  play.  No  doubt 
Shakespeare  felt  that  there  is  no  reason  why 
the  heroic  should  not  be  treated  for  once  from 
the  valet  point  of  view.  But  how  has  Dryden 
handled  the  theme  ?  By  adding  to  the  coarse- 
ness of  Thersites  and  Pandarus  in  the  play — 
coarse  enough  already — and  by  simply  excising 
all  the  poetry. 

But  if  his  treatment  of  Troilus  and  Cressida 
is  grotesque,  what  shall  be  said  of  his  treatment 
of  the  most  romantic  of  all  plays,  The  Tempest, 
where,  in  order  to  improve  the  romantic  in- 
terest of  the  play,  he  and  D'Avenant  give  us  a 
male  Miranda  who  had  never  seen  a  woman, 
and  a  female  Caliban  to  match  the  male  monster 
of  Shakespeare  ?  The  same  fate  befel  him 
when  he  undertook  to  modernise  Boccaccio. 
The  one  quality  which  saves  the  cruel  story 
of  Theodore  and  Honoria  from  disgusting  the 


252  THE   RENASCENCE 

truly  imaginative  reader  is  the  air  of  wild  ro- 
mance in  which  it  is  enveloped.  Remove 
that  and  it  becomes  a  story  of  mutilation,  blood, 
and  shambles.  Dryden  does  take  away  that 
atmosphere  from  the  story  and  ruins  it.  Again, 
take  Boccaccio's  beautiful  story  of  Sigismonda 
and  Guiscardo.  It  seems  impossible  to  coarsen 
and  brutalise  this  until  we  read  Dry  den's 
modernisation. 

Nothing  shows  more  forcibly  the  distinctive 
effect  of  the  new  temper  of  acceptance  than  the 
ill-fortune  that  befel  those  priceless  romantic 
ballads  which  in  their  oral  form  had  been  so 
full  of  the  poetry  of  wonder  in  the  days  of  the 
poetical  past.  From  various  European  coun- 
tries— from  Germany,  from  Italy,  from  France, 
from  Spain,  from  Roumania — a  stream  of  legen 
dary  lore  in  ballad  form  had  flowed  into  Great 
Britain  and  spread  all  over  the  island,  not  in 
Scotland  and  the  Border  country  merely,  but 
in  mid  and  southern  England  also,  where  it  had 
only  an  oral  life.  But  when  there  came  from 
the  Continent  the  prosaic  wave  of  materialism 
which  killed  poetry  properly  so  called,  inasmuch 
as  it  stifled  for  a  time  the  great  instinct  of  won- 
der, it  killed,  as  far  as  mid  and  south  England 
are  concerned,  the  romantic  ballad  also.  For 


OF   WONDER  253 

during  this  arid  period  the  ballad  in  the  southern 
counties  passed  into  type.  The  "  stall  copy," 
as  was  pointed  out  by  that  fine  genius  and  var- 
iously equipped  critic,  Andrew  Lang,  destroyed 
the  South  English  ballad.  For  the  transcriber 
of  ballads  for  the  stall  was  under  the  influence 
of  the  anti-poetic  literature  of  his  time,  and 
the  very  beauties  of  the  ballads  as  they  came 
from  the  reciter's  mouth  seemed  to  him  bar- 
barisms, and  he  substituted  for  them  his  notions 
of  "  polite  "  poetic  diction. 

With  regard  to  what  we  have  called  the 
realistic  side  of  the  romantic  movement  as 
distinguished  from  its  purely  poetical  and  super- 
natural side,  Nature  was  for  the  "  Augustan  " 
temper  much  too  ungenteel  to  be  described 
realistically.  Yet  we  must  not  suppose  that 
in  the  eighteenth  century  Nature  turned  out 
men  without  imaginations,  without  the  natural 
gift  of  emotional  speech,  and  without  the  faculty 
of  gazing  honestly  in  her  face.  She  does  not 
work  in  that  way.  In  the  time  of  the  mammoth 
and  the  cave-bear  she  will  give  birth  to  a  great 
artist  whose  materials  may  be  a  flint  and  a  tusk. 
In  the  period  before  Greece  was  Greece,  among 
a  handful  of  Achaians  she  will  give  birth  to  the 
greatest  poet,  or,  perhaps  we  should  say  the 


254  THE   RENASCENCE 

greatest  group  of  poets  the  world  has  ever  yet 
seen.  In  the  time  of  Elizabeth  she  will  give 
birth,  among  the  illiterate  yeomen  of  a  diminu- 
tive country  town,  to  a  dramatist  with  such 
inconceivable  insight  and  intellectual  breadth 
that  his  generalisations  cover  not  only  the  in- 
tellectual limbs  of  his  own  time  but  the  intel- 
lectual limbs  of  so  complex  an  epoch  as  that  of 
the  twentieth  century. 

Poetic  art  had  come  to  consist  in  clever 
manipulations  of  the  stock  conventional  langu- 
age common  to  all  writers  alike — the  language 
of  poetry  had  become  so  utterly  artificial,  so 
entirely  removed  from  the  language  in  which  the 
soul  of  man  would  naturally  express  its  emotions, 
that  poetry  must  die  out  altogether  unless  some 
kind  of  reaction  should  set  in.  Roughly  speak- 
ing, from  the  appearance  of  the  last  of  Milton's 
poetry  to  the  publication  of  Parnell's  Night- 
piece,  the  business  of  the  poet  was  not  to  repre- 
sent Nature,  but  to  decorate  her  and  then  work 
himself  up  into  as  much  rapture  as  gentility 
would  allow  over  the  decorations.  Not  that 
Parnell  got  free  from  the  Augustan  vices,  but 
partially  free  he  did  get  at  last.  Among  much 
that  is  tawdry  and  false  in  his  earlier  poems,  the 
following  lines  describing  the  osier-banded  graves 


OF   WONDER  255 

might  have  been  written  at  the  same  time 
as  Wordsworth's  Excursion  so  far  as  truthful 
representation  of  Nature  is  concerned. 

The  grounds  which  on  the  right  aspire 
In  dimness  from  the  view  retire ; 
The  left  presents  a  place  of  graves 
Whose  wall  the  silent  water  laves  ; 
That  steeple  guides  thy  doubtful  sight 
Among  the  livid  gleams  of  night. 

****** 
Those  graves,  with  bending  osier  bound, 
That  nameless  heave  the  crumbled  ground, 
Quick  to  the  glancing  thought  disclose 
Where  toil  and  poverty  repose. 

Then  came  Thomson's  Seasons  and  showed 
that  the  worst  was  over.  If  we  consider  that 
his  Winter  appeared  as  early  as  1726,  and  Sum- 
mer and  Spring  in  1727  and  1728,  and  if  we 
consider  the  intimate  and  first-hand  knowledge 
Thomson  shows  of  Nature  in  so  many  of  her 
moods  in  the  British  Islands,  it  is  not  difficult 
to  find  his  place  in  English  poetry.  No  doubt 
his  love  of  Nature  was  restricted  to  Nature  in 
her  gentle  and  even  her  homely  moods.  He 
could  describe  as  "  horrid  "  that  same  Penmaen- 
mawr  which  to  the  lover  of  Wales  is  so  fascina- 
ting. Still  from  this  time  a  new  life  was  breathed 
into  English  Poetry.  But  the  new  growth  was 
slow. 


256  THE   RENASCENCE 

Take  the  case  of  Gray,  for  instance.  Not 
even  the  Chinese  mandarin  above  described  was 
more  genteel  than  Gray.  In  him  we  get  the 
very  quintessence  of  the  "  Augustan  "  temper. 
Yet  no  one  who  reads  his  letters  can  doubt  that 
Nature  had  endowed  him  with  a  true  eye  for 
local  colour.  And  although  Gray  was  not 
strong  enough  to  throw  off  the  conventional 
diction  of  his  time,  he  was  yet  strong  enough  to 
speak  to  us  sometimes  through  the  muffler 
of  that  diction  with  a  voice  that  thrills  the  ears 
of  even  those  who  have  listened  to  the  song  of 
Coleridge,  Keats,  and  Shelley.  Gray's  chief 
poem,  the  famous  elegy,  furnishes  a  striking 
proof  of  the  poet's  slavery  to  Augustanism. 
While  reading  about  "  the  solemn  yew-tree's 
shade,"  "  the  ivy-mantled  tower,"  and  the  rest 
of  the  conventional  accessories  of  such  a  situa- 
tion, the  reader  yearns  for  such  concrete  pictures 
as  we  get  in  plenty  not  only  in  Wordsworth  and 
those  who  succeeded  him,  but  even  in  Parnell 
and  Thomson.  Noble  as  this  poem  is,  it  has  a 
fundamental  fault — a  fault  which  is  great — 
it  lacks  individual  humanity.  Who  is  the 
"  me  "  of  the  poem — this  "  me  "  to  whom,  in 
company  with  "  Darkness  "  the  homeward  plod- 
ding ploughman  "  leaves  the  world  "  ?  The 


OF   WONDER  257 

thoughts  are  fine  ;  but  is  the  thinker  a  moralising 
ghost  among  the  tombstones,  or  is  he  a  flesh- 
trammelled  philosopher  sitting  upon  the  church- 
yard wall  ?  The  poem  rolls  on  sonorously, 
and  the  reader's  imagination  yearns  for  a  stanza 
full  of  picture  and  pathetic  suggestion  of  in- 
dividual life — full  of  those  bewitching  qualities, 
in  short,  which  are  the  characteristics  of  all 
English  poetry  save  that  of  the  era  of  acceptance 
the  era  of  gentility — the  Augustan  era. 

At  last,  however,  the  poet  does  strike  out 
a  stanza  of  this  kind,  and  immediately  it  sheds 
a  warmth  and  a  glow  upon  all  that  has  gone 
before — vitalises  the  whole,  in  short.  Describ- 
ing the  tomb  of  the  hitherto  shadowy  moraliser, 
Gray  says  : 

There  scattered  oft,  the  earliest  of  the  year, 
By  hands  unseen,  are  showers  of  violets  found  ; 

The  redbreast  loves  to  build  and  warble  there, 
And  little  footsteps  lightly  print  the  ground. 

Now  at  last  we  see  that  the  moraliser  is  not  a 
spectre  whose  bones  are  marrowless  and  whose 
blood  is  cold,  but  a  man,  the  homely  creature 
that  Homer  and  Shakespeare  loved  to  paint ; 
a  man  with  friends  to  scatter  violets  over  his 
grave  and  little  children  to  come  and  mourn  by 
it ;  a  man  so  tender,  genial,  and  good  that  the 

s 


258  THE   RENASCENCE 

very  redbreasts  loved  him.  And  having  written 
this  powerful  stanza,  full  of  the  true  romantic 
temper,  having  printed  it  in  two  editions,  Gray 
cancelled  it,  and  no  doubt  the  age  of  acceptance 
and  gentility  approved  the  omission.  For  what 
are  children  and  violets  and  robins  warb- 
ling round  a  grave  compared  with  "  the  muse's 
flame  "  and  "  the  ecstasy  "  of  the  "  living  lyre," 
and  such  elegant  things  ? 

And  again,  who  had  a  finer  imagination  than 
Collins  ?  Who  possessed  more  fully  than  he  the 
imaginative  power  of  seeing  a  man  asleep  on  a 
loose  hanging  rock,  and  of  actualising  in  a 
dramatic  way  the  peril  of  the  situation  ?  But 
there  is  something  very  ungenteel  about  a  mere 
man,  as  Augustanism  had  discovered.  A  man 
is  a  very  homely  and  common  creature,  and  the 
worker  in  '  polite  letters '  must  avoid  the 
homely  and  the  common  ;  whereas  a  personifi- 
cation of  Danger  is  literary,  Augustan,  and 
'  polite.'  Hence,  Collins,  having  first  imagined 
with  excessive  vividness  a  man  hanging  on  a 
loose  rock  asleep,  set  to  work  immediately  to 
turn  the  man  into  an  abstraction  : 

Danger,  whose  limbs  of  giant  mould 
What  mortal  eye  can  fixed  behold  ? 
Who  stalks  his  round,  a  hideous  form, 
Howling  amidst  the  midnight  storm, 
Or  throws  him  on  the  ridgy  steep 
Of  some  loose  hanging  rock  to  sleep. 


OF   WONDER  259 

There  is  one  Greek  poet  who  in  virtue  of  a  few 
fragments  of  immortal  verse  is  often  placed  by 
critics — and,  as  we  think,  rightly  placed — at 
the  very  head  of  all  lyric  poets  ;  we  need  only 
refer,  we  say,  to  her  who  in  one  quality  is  first 
among  the  poets  of  the  world — first,  without  a 
second — in  that  rare  verbal  economy  which  is 
the  very  accent  of  passion  when  at  white  heat 
— Sappho.  To  write  of  such  a  poet  as  Sappho 
with  any  approach  to  adequacy  would  tax  the 
best  efforts  of  the  best  poets.  This  is  how  an 
eighteenth  century  poet,  Smollett,  speaks  of 
her  : — 

When  Sappho  struck  the  quiv'ring  wire, 
The  throbbing  breast  was  all  on  fire  ; 
And  when  she  raised  the  vocal  lay, 
The  captive  soul  was  charm'd  away  1 

If  Gray  and  Collins  were  giants  imprisoned 
in  the  jar  of  eighteenth-century  convention, 
they  were  followed  by  a  '  marvellous  boy  '  who 
refused  to  be  so  imprisoned.  It  may  be  said  of 
Chatterton  that  he  was  the  Renascence  of 
Wonder  incarnate.  To  him  St.  Mary  Redcliffe 
Church  was  as  much  alive  as  were  the  men 
about  whom  Pope  wrote  with  such  astonishing 
prosaic  brilliance.  This  is  one  of  the  reasons 
why  he  bulks  so  largely  among  the  poets  of 
the  Renascence  of  Wonder.  For  this  renascence 
was  shown  not  merely  in  the  way  in  which 
Man's  mysterious  destiny  was  conceived,  but 


260  THE   RENASCENCE 

also  in  the  way  in  which  the  theatre  of  the 
human  drama  was  confronted.  This  theatre 
became  as  fresh,  as  replete  with  wonder,  as  the 
actors  themselves.  A  new  seeing  was  lent  to 
man's  eyes.  And  of  this  young  poet  it  may 
almost  be  said  that  he  saw  what  science  is  now 
affirming — the  kinship  between  man  and  the 
lower  animal ;  nay,  even  the  sentience  of  the 
vegetable  world  :  further  still,  he  felt  that  what 
is  called  dead  matter  is — as  the  very  latest 
science  is  telling  us — in  a  certain  mysterious 
sense  alive,  shedding  its  influence  around  it. 

With  regard  to  his  poetical  methods,  I  have 
on  several  occasions  partially  discussed  this 
matter.  I  have  pointed  out  that  all  Chat- 
terton's  critics  seem  to  miss  a  peculiar  musical 
movement  governing  his  ear,  which  often  ren- 
ders it  impossible  to  replace,  by  any  modern 
word  whatsoever,  an  archaism  or  pseudo- 
archaism  of  his,  whether  invented  by  himself  or 
found  in  Bailey  or  Speght.  Dominated  as  he 
generally  was  by  eighteenth  century  move- 
ments, Chatterton  yet  showed  at  times  an 
originality  of  ear  that  is  very  remarkable.  His 
metrical  inventiveness  has  never  been  perceived 
—certainly  it  has  never  been  touched  upon— 
by  any  of  his  critics,  from  Tyrwhitt  downwards. 
His  influence  has  worked  primarily  through  the 
great  lord  of  romance,  Coleridge  himself,  who 
(partly,  it  may  be,  from  Chatterton's  connexion 
with  Bristol)  was  profoundly  impressed  both  by 


OF   WONDER  261 

the  tragic  pathos  of  Chatterton's  life  and  by  the 
excellence,  actual  as  well  as  potential,  of  some 
of  his  works.  And  when  we  come  to  consider 
the  influence  Coleridge  himself  had  upon  the 
English  romantic  movement  generally,  and 
especially  upon  Shelley  and  Keats,  and  the 
enormous  influence  these  latter  have  had  upon 
subsequent  poets,  it  seems  impossible  to  refuse 
to  Chatterton  the  place  of  the  protagonist  of 
the  New  Romantic  school. 

As  to  the  romantic  spirit,  it  would  be  difficult 
to  name  any  one  of  his  successors,  except 
Coleridge  himself,  in  whom  the  high  temper  of 
romance  has  shown  so  intense  a  life.  And,  as 
to  the  romantic  form,  it  is  matter  of  familiar 
knowledge,  that  the  lyric  octo-syllabic  move- 
ment of  which  Scott  afterwards  made  such 
excellent  use  in  The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel, 
was  originally  borrowed  by  Scott  from  Cole- 
ridge. Afterwards,  when  Christabel  was  pub- 
lished in  1816,  Coleridge  speaks  of  the  ana- 
paestic dance  with  which  he  varies  the  iambic 
lines,  as  being  "  founded  on  a  new  principle  "  ; 
and  he  has  been  much  praised,  and  very  justly, 
for  such  effects  as  this  : — 

'  And  Christabel  saw  the  lady's  eye, 
And  nothing  else  saw  she  thereby, 
Save  the  boss  of  the  shield  of  Sir  Leoline  tall, 
Which  hung  in  a  murky  old  niche  in  the  wall." 

That  this  "  new  principle "  was  known  to 
Chatterton  is  seen  in  the  following  extract, 
which  has  exactly  the  Christabel  ring — the  ring 


262  THE   RENASCENCE 

which  Scott  only  half  caught,  and  which  Byron 
failed  really  to  catch  at  all :  Coleridge  alone 
caught  it  entirely  and  splendidly. 

"  But  when  he  threwe  downe  his  asenglave, 
Next  came  in  Syr  Hotelier  bold  and  brave, 
The  dethe  of  manie  a  Saraceen, 
Theie  thought  him  a  devil  from  Hell's  black  den, 
Na  thinking  that  anie  of  Mortalle  menne 
Could  send  so  manie  to  the  grave. 
For  his  life  to  John  Rumsee  he  render'd  his  thanks, 
Descended  from  Godred,  the  King  of  the  Manks." 

With  regard  to  octo-syllabics  with  ana- 
paestic variations,  it  may  be  said  no  doubt  that 
some  of  the  miracle-plays  (such  as  the  Fall  of 
Man)  are  composed  in  this  movement,  as  is 
also  one  of  the  months  in  Spenser's  Shepherd's 
Calendar  ;  but  the  irregularity  in  these  is,  like 
that  which  is  too  often  seen  in  the  Border 
Ballads,  the  irregularity  of  makeshift,  while 
Chatterton's  Unknown  Knight,  like  Christabel, 
and  like  Goethe's  Erl  King,  had  several  varia- 
tions introduced  (as  Coleridge  says  of  his  own) 
"  in  correspondence  with  some  transition  in  the 
nature  of  the  imagery  or  passion."  The  "  new 
principle,"  in  short,  was  Chatterton's. 

Again,  in  the  mysterious  suggestiveness  of 
remote  geographical  names,  a  suggestiveness 
quite  other  than  the  pomp  and  sonority  which 
Marlowe  and  Milton  so  loved — the  world-in- 
volving echoes  of  Kubla  Khan  seem  to  have  been 
caught  from  such  lines  as  these  in  Chatterton's 
African  eclogue  Narva  and  Mored — 


OF   WONDER  263 

"  From  Lorbar's  cave  to  where  the  nations  end,  .  . 
Explores  the  palaces  on  Lira's  coast, 
Where  howls  the  war-song  of  the  Chieftain's  ghost,  .  . 
Like  the  loud  echoes  on  Toddida's  sea, 
The  warrior's  circle,  the  mysterious  tree." 

And  turning  to  the  question  of  Chatterton's 
influence  upon  Keats,  it  is  not  only  indirectly 
through  Coleridge  that  the  rich  mind  of  Keats 
shows  signs  of  having  drunk  at  Chatterton's 
fountain  of  romance  :  there  is  a  side  of  Chat- 
terton  which  Keats  knew,  and  which  Coleridge 
did  not. 

It  is  difficult  to  express  in  words  wherein  lies 
the  entirely  spiritual  kinship  between  Chat- 
terton's Ballad  of  Charity  and  Keats's  Eve  of 
St.  Agnes,  yet  most  critics,  I  think,  will  recog- 
nise that  kinship.  Not  only  are  the  beggar 
and  the  thunderstorm  depicted  with  the  sen- 
suous sympathy  and  melodious  insistence  which 
is  the  characteristic  charm  of  the  Eve  of  St. 
Agnes,  but  the  movement  of  the  lines  is  often 
the  same.  Take,  for  instance,  the  description 
of  Keats's  bedesman,  "  meagre,  barefoot,  wan," 
which  is,  in  point  of  metrical  movement,  identi- 
cal with  Chatterton's  description  of  the  arms- 
craver,  "  withered  forwynd,  dead."  More  ob- 
vious perhaps,  yet  not  more  essentially  true, 
is  the  likeness  between  the  famous  passage  in 
Keats's  Isabella,  beginning, 

"  For  them  the  Ceylon  diver  held  his  breath, 
And  went  all  naked  to  the  hungry  shark,"  etc. 

and  these  four  lines  in  Chatterton's  Narva  and 
Mored, 


264  THE   RENASCENCE 

"  Where  the  pale  children  of  the  feeble  sun 
In  search  of  gold  through  every  climate  run 
From  burning  heat  to  freezing  torments  go, 
And  live  in  all  vicissitudes  of  woe." 

It  was  perfectly  fit,  therefore,  that  Keats 
should  dedicate  his  Endymion  to  the  memory 
of  Thomas  Chatter  ton.  Not  that  Keats  or 
Coleridge  stole  from  Chatterton  :  no  two  poets 
had  less  need  to  steal  from  anyone.  But  the 
whole  history  of  poetry  shows  that  poetic 
methods  are  a  growth  as  well  as  an  inspiration. 

So  steeped  indeed  was  Chatterton  in  romance, 
that,  except  in  the  case  of  the  African  Eclogues, 
his  imagination  seems  to  be  never  really  alive 
save  when  in  the  dramatic  masquerade  of  the 
monk  of  Bristol. 

Then  came  Cowper,  whose  later  poetry,  when 
it  is  contrasted  with  the  jargon  of  Hay  ley, 
seems  to  belong  to  another  world.  But  it  is 
possible,  perhaps,  to  credit  Cowper  with  too 
much  in  this  matter. 

He  was  followed  by  a  poet  who  did  as  much 
for  the  romantic  movement  as  even  the  "  mar- 
vellous boy  "  himself  could  do.  Although  Burns 
like  so  many  other  fine  poets  has  left  behind 
him  some  poor  stuff,  it  would  be  as  difficult  to 
exaggerate  his  intellectual  strength  as  to  over- 
estimate his  genius.  The  dialect  of  the  Scot- 
tish peasantry  had  already  been  admirably 
worked  in  by  certain  of  his  predecessors,  but 


OF   WONDER  265 

it  was  left  to  Burns  to  bring  it  into  high  poetry. 
In  mere  style  he  is,  when  writing  in  Scots, 
to  be  ranked  with  the  great  masters.  No  one 
realised  more  fully  than  he  the  power  of  verbal 
parsimony  in  poetry.  As  a  quarter  of  an  ounce 
of  bullet  in  its  power  of  striking  home  is  to  an 
ounce  of  duck-shot,  so  is  a  line  of  Burns  to  a 
line  of  any  other  poet  save  two,  both  of  whom 
are  extremely  unlike  him  in  other  respects  and 
extremely  unlike  each  other.  To  conciseness 
he  made  everything  yield  as  completely  as  did 
Villon  in  the  Ballade  des  Dames  du  Temps  Jadis, 
and  in  Les  Regrets  de  la  Belle  Heaulmihe,  and  as 
completely  as  did  Dante  in  the  most  concise  of 
his  lines.  As  surely  as  Dante's  condensation  is 
born  of  an  intensity  of  imaginative  vision,  so 
surely  is  Burns' s  condensation  born  of  an  inten- 
sity of  passion.  Since  Dray  ton  wrote  his  son- 
net beginning  : 

"  Since  ther's  no  helpe,  come  let  us  kiss  and  part !  " 

there  had  been  nothing  in  the  shape  of  pas- 
sionate English  poetry  in  rhyme  that  could 
come  near  Burns' s  lines  : 

Had  we  never  loved  sac  kindly, 
Had  we  never  loved  sae  blindly, 
Never  met  or  never  parted, 
We    had    ne'er    been    broken-hearted. 


266  THE   RENASCENCE 

But,  splendid  as  is  his  passionate  poetry,  it  is 
specially  as  an  absolute  humorist  that  he 
towers  above  all  the  poets  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  Undoubtedly,  to  get  away  on  all 
occasions  from  the  shadow  of  the  great  social 
pyramid  was  not  to  be  expected  of  a  poet  at 
the  time,  and  in  the  conditions  in  which  Burns 
was  born.  Yet  it  is  astonishing  how  this 
Scottish  yeoman  did  get  away  from  it  at  times, 
as  in  "  A  Man's  a  Man  for  a'  that.'  It  is  aston- 
ishing to  realise  how  he  was  able  to  show  a 
feeling  for  absolute  humour  such  as  in  the 
eighteenth  century  had  only  been  shown  by 
prose  writers — prose  writers  of  the  first  rank — 
like  Swift  and  Sterne.  Indeed,  if  we  did  not 
remember  that  he  followed  the  creator  of  Uncle 
Toby,  he  would  take,  if  that  were  possible,  a 
still  higher  place  than  he  now  does  as  an  absolute 
humorist.  Not  even  Uncle  Toby's  apostrophe 
to  the  fly  is  finer  than  Burns's  lines  to  a  mouse 
on  turning  her  up  with  a  plough.  But  his  lines 
to  a  mountain  daisy,  which  he  had  turned  down 
with  the  plough,  are  full  of  a  deeper  humour 
still — a  humorous  sympathy  with  the  veget- 
able no  less  than  with  the  animal  kingdom. 
There  is  nothing  in  all  poetry  which  touches  it. 
Much  admiration  has  been  given,  and  rightly 


OF  WONDER  267 

given  to  Dorothy  Wordsworth's  beautiful  prose 
words  in  her  diary  about  the  daffodil,  as  showing 
how  a  nature-lover  without  the  '  accomplish- 
ment of  verse  '  can  make  us  conscious  of  the 
consciousness  of  a  wild-flower.  But  they  were 
written  after  Burns,  and  though  they  have 
some  of  Burns' s  playfulness,  they  cannot  be 
said  to  show  his  humour. 

It  is  in  poems  of  another  class,  however — in 
such  poems  as  the  f  Address  to  the  De'il ' — 
that  we  get  his  greatest  triumph  as  an  absolute 
humorist,  for  there  we  get  the  "  cosmic 
humour  "  before  alluded  to — the  very  crown 
and  flower  of  all  humour.  And  take  "  Holy 
Willie's  Prayer,"  where,  biting  as  is  the  satire, 
the  poet's  humorous  enjoyment  of  it  carries  it 
into  the  rarest  poetry.  In  '  Tarn  o'  Shanter  ' 
we  get  the  finest  mixture  of  humour  and  wisdom, 
the  finest  instance  of  Teutonic  grotesque,  to  be 
found  in  all  English  poetry.  In  '  The  Jolly 
Beggars,'  Burns  now  and  again  shows  that  he 
could  pass  into  the  mood  of  true  Pantagruelism 
— a  mood  which  is  of  all  moods  the  rarest  and 
the  finest — a  mood  which  requires  in  the 
humorist  such  a  blessed  mixture  of  the  juices 
as  nature  cannot  often  in  a  climate  like  ours 
achieve. 


268  THE    RENASCENCE 

A  true  child  of  the  Renascence  of  Wonder  who 
followed  Burns,  William  Blake,  though  he  was 
entirely  without  humour,  and  showed  not  much 
power  of  giving  realistic  pictures  of  nature,  had 
a  finer  sense  of  the  supernatural  than  any  of  his 
predecessors. 


PART  II 

AND  now,  at  last,  after  this  swift  and 
wide  circuit,  we  are  able  to  turn  to 
the  central  idea  of  this  essay,  the 
modern  Renascence  of  Wonder, 
which  followed  the  long  epoch  of  acceptance 
known  as  "  English  Augustanism."  It  is  not 
our  purpose  in  this  work  to  discuss  the  poetry 
of  any  one  of  the  poets  of  this  great  epoch 
except  in  regard  to  the  Renascence  of  Wonder. 
In  1765  Percy  had  published  his  famous  collec- 
tion of  old  ballads,  and  this  directed  general 
attention  to  our  ballad  literature.  The  first  poet 
among  the  great  group  who  fell  under  the 
influence  of  the  old  ballads  was  probably  Scott, 
who  in  1802  brought  out  the  first  two  volumes 
of  his  priceless  Border  Minstrelsy.  The  old 
ballads  were,  of  course,  very  unequal  in  quality, 
but  among  them  were  '  Clerk  Saunders,'  '  The 
Wife  of  Usher's  Well,'  '  The  Young  Tamlane,' 
and  the  great  ballad  which  Scott  afterwards 
named  '  The  Demon  Lover,'  with  certain 
others  which  compel  us  to  set  the  '  Border 

269 


270  THE   RENASCENCE 

Ballads/  as  they  are  called,  at  the  very  top 
of  the  real  poetry  of  the  modern  world.  Cole- 
ridge, as  we  are  going  to  see,  could  give  us  the 
weird  and  the  beautiful  combined,  but  he  could 
not  blend  with  these  qualities  such  dramatic 
humanity  and  intense  pathos  as  are  expressed 
in  certain  stanzas  in  "  The  Wife  of  Usher's 
Well,"  and  in  such  writing  as  this  from  '  Clerk 
Saunders,'  where  Saunders's  mistress,  after  he 
had  been  assassinated  by  her  brothers  throws 
herself  upon  his  grave  and  exclaims  : — 

Is  there  ony  roome  at  your  head,  Saunders  ? 

Is  there  ony  roome  at  your  feet  ? 
Or  ony  roome  at  your  side,  Saundera, 

Where  fain,  fain,  I  wad  sleep  ? 

Scott,  we  say,  is  entitled  to  be  placed  at  the 
head  of  those  who  are  generally  accredited  with 
originating  the  Renascence  of  Wonder  at  the 
end  of  the  eighteenth  century. 

But  great  as  was  the  influence  of  Scott  in  this 
matter,  it  is  hard  to  see  how  the  effect  of  his 
romantic  work  would  have  been  so  potent  as  it 
now  is  without  the  influence  of  Coleridge. 
Scott's  friend  Stoddart,  having  heard  Coleridge 
recite  the  first  part  of  Christabel  while  still  in 
manuscript,  and  having  a  memory  that  retained 
everything,  repeated  the  poem  to  Scott.  The 


OF   WONDER  271 

seed  fell  upon  a  soil  of  magical  fertility.  Scott 
at  once  sat  down  and  produced  The  Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel.  There  is  no  need  to  say  with 
Leigh  Hunt  that  Scott's  vigorous  poem  is  a 
coarse  travesty  of  Christabel  in  order  to  admit 
that,  full  as  it  is  of  splendid  imaginative  quali- 
ties, it  is  defective  in  technique,  and  often  cheap 
in  diction.  Some  of  Scott's  romantic  ballads 
and  snatches  of  verse,  however,  scattered 
through  his  novels  show  that  it  was  a  languid 
artistic  conscience  alone  that  prevented  him 
from  taking  a  much  higher  place  as  a  poet  than 
he  now  takes.  If  he  never  learnt,  as  Coleridge 
knew  by  instinct,  the  truth  so  admirably 
expressed  in  Joubert's  saying  that  '  it  is  better 
to  be  exquisite  than  to  be  ample,'  it  really  seems 
to  have  been  because  he  did  not  think  it  worth 
while  to  learn  to  be  exquisite.  For  the  distinctive 
quality  of  Scott  is  that  he  seems  to  be  greater 
than  his  work — as  much  greater,  indeed,  as  a 
spreading  oak  seems  greater  than  the  leaves  it 
sheds.  Coleridge's  Christabel,  The  Ancient 
Mariner,  and  Kiibla  Khan  are,  as  regards  the 
romantic  spirit,  above — and  far  above — any 
work  of  any  other  English  poet.  Instances 
innumerable  might  be  adduced  showing  how 
his  very  nature  was  steeped  in  the  fountain 


272  THE    RENASCENCE 

from  which  the  old  balladists  themselves  drew, 
but  in  a  survey  so  brief  as  this  there  is  room 
to  give  only  one.  In  the  '  Conclusion '  of  the 
first  part  of  Christabel  he  recapitulates  and 
summarises,  in  lines  that  are  at  once  matchless 
as  poetry  and  matchless  in  succinctness  of 
statement,  the  entire  story  of  the  bewitched 
maiden  and  her  terrible  foe  which  had  gone 
before  : 

A  star  hath  set,  a  star  hath  risen, 
O  Geraldine !  since  arms  of  thine 
Have  been  the  lovely  lady's  prison. 
O  Geraldine  1  one  hour  was  thine — 
Thou'st  had  thy  will !     By  tairn  and  rill, 
The  night-birds  all  that  hour  were  still. 
But  now  they  are  jubilant  anew, 
From  cliff  and  tower,  tu-whoo  !  tu-whoo  1 
Tu-whoo  1  tu-whoo  1  from  wood  and  fell  1 

Here  we  get  that  feeling  of  the  inextricable  web 
in  which  the  human  drama  and  external  nature 
are  woven  which  is  the  very  soul  of  poetic 
wonder.  So  great  is  the  maleficent  power  of  the 
beautiful  witch  that  a  spell  is  thrown  over  all 
Nature.  For  an  hour  the  very  woods  and  fells 
remain  in  a  shuddering  state  of  sympathetic 
consciousness  of  her— 

The  night-birds  all  that  hour  were  still. 


OF   WONDER  273 

When  the  spell  is  passed  Nature  awakes  as  from 
a  hideous  nightmare,  and  '  the  night-birds '  are 
jubilant  anew.  This  is  the  very  highest  reach  of 
poetic  wonder — finer,  if  that  be  possible,  than 
the  night-storm  during  the  murder  of  Duncan. 
And  note  the  artistic  method  by  which  Cole- 
ridge gives  us  this  amazing  and  overwhelming 
picture  of  the  oneness  of  all  Nature.  However 
the  rhymes  may  follow  each  other,  it  is  always 
easy  for  the  critic,  by  studying  the  intellectual 
and  emotional  movement  of  the  sequence,  to 
see  which  rhyme-word  first  came  to  the  poet's 
mind,  and  suggested  the  rhyme-words  to  follow 
or  precede  it.  It  is  the  witch's  maleficent  will- 
power which  here  dominates  the  poet's  mind 
as  he  writes.  Therefore  we  know  that  he  first 
wrote — 

Thou'st  had  thy  will. 

In  finding  a  rhyme-word  for  '  will '  and  '  rill/ 
the  word  '  still '  would  of  course  present  itself, 
among  others,  to  any  poet's  mind ;  but  it 
required  a  poet  steeped  in  the  true  poetic 
wonder  of  "  pre-Augustanism,"  it  required  Cole- 
ridge, whose  genius  was  that  very  Lady  of  the 
Lake, 

Sole-sitting  by  the  shores  of  Old  Romance  — 

T 


274  THE   RENASCENCE 

to  feel  the  most  tremendous  and  awe-inspiring 
picture,  perhaps,  in  all  poetry  called  up  to  his 
imagination — 

The  night-birds  all  that  hour  were  still. 

The  nearer  in  temper  any  other  line  approaches 
this,  the  nearer  does  it  approach  the  ideal  of 
poetic  wonder.  It  is,  however,  owing  to  the  very 
rarity  of  Coleridge's  genius  that  not  he  but 
Scott  popularised  the  romantic  movement.  In 
such  purely  poetical  work  as  the  first  part  of 
Christabel,  which  was  entirely  unlocalised,  real- 
istic mediaeval  pictures  were  not  requisite  as 
they  were  in  the  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel.  After 
such  work  as  Coleridge's  all  that  the  romantic 
revival  needed  was  a  poet  who  would  supply 
it  with  feet  in  addition  to  wings.  Scott  supplied 
those  feet.  However,  in  the  second  part  of 
Christabel,  written  later — in  which  the  poem  is 
localised  after  Scott's  manner — Coleridge  showed 
so  much  of  Scott's  influence  that  it  may  not  be 
too  fanciful  to  call  these  two  immortal  poets 
the  binary  star  of  romanticism  revolving  around 
one  common  poetic  centre.  Scott's  poetry 
became  so  immensely  popular  that  it  soon  set 
every  poet  and  every  versifier,  from  Byron 
downwards,  writing  romantic  stories  in  octo- 


OF   WONDER  275 

syllabic  couplets,  with  the  old  anapaestic  lilt 
of  romantic  poetry. 

As  regards  Wordsworth's  share  in  this  move- 
ment, though  it  was,  no  doubt,  confined  largely 
to  poetic  methods,  the  following  superb  lines 
from  '  Yew  Trees '  can  be  set  beside  even 
Coleridge's  masterpieces  as  regards  the  romantic 
side  of  the  Renascence  of  Wonder  : 

Beneath  whose  sable  roof 
Of  boughs,  as  if  for  festal  purpose,  decked 
With  unrejoicing  berries — ghostly  shapes 
May  meet  at  noontide,  Fear  and  trembling  Hope, 
Silence  and  Foresight,  Death  the  Skeleton 
And  Time  the  Shadow — there  to  celebrate, 
As  in  a  natural  temple  scattered  o'er 
With  altars  undisturbed  of  mossy  stone, 
United  worship,  or  in  mute  repose 
To  lie,  and  listen  to  the  mountain  flood 
Murmuring  from  Glaramara's  inmost  caves. 

Whether  the  reaction  would  have  died  out  (as 
did  the  revival  of  natural  language  by  Theo- 
critus after  such  comparatively  feeble  followers 
as  Bion  and  Moschus)  had  not  Wordsworth's 
indomitable  will  and  masterful  simplicity  of 
character  stood  up  and  saved  it,  or  whether, 
on  the  contrary,  the  movement  was  injured  and 
delayed  by  this  obstinacy  and  simplicity  of 
character — which  led  him  into  exaggerated 
theories,  exposing  it  to  ridicule— is  perhaps  a. 


276  THE   RENASCENCE 

debatable  question.  However,  it  ended  by  the 
"  poetic  "  temper,  the  "  poetic  "  diction,  and 
the  "  poetic  "  methods,  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury being  swept  away.  But  as  to  real  know- 
ledge of  the  mere  physiognomy  of  medievalism, 
Coleridge  and  Scott  were  perhaps  on  a  par. 
Indeed,  imperfect  knowledge  of  this  physiog- 
nomy was  a  weak  point  in  the  entire  group  of 
poets  who  set  to  work  to  revive  it.  Coleridge 
showed  a  certain  knowledge  of  it,  which,  like 
Scott's,  was  no  doubt  above  that  of  Horace 
Walpole  and  Mrs.  Radcliffe.  But  since  the  great 
accumulation  of  learning  upon  this  subject 
which  came  afterwards  for  the  use  of  English 
poets  it  seems  slight  enough.  Abbotsford  alone 
is  enough  to  show  that  Scott  did  not  fully 
escape  the  bastard  medievalism  of  the  eight- 
teenth  century.  But  we  can  forgive  Scott  all 
in  the  matter  of  exactitude.  If  he  in  Ivanhoe 
vanquished  every  difficulty,  and  wrote  an 
immortal  mediaeval  romance  with  not  many 
touches  of  true  medievalism,  that  is  only 
another  proof  of  his  vitalising  imagination  and 
genius.  Fortunately,  however,  Scott  was  some- 
thing more  than  a  man  like  his  successor, 
Meinhold,  who  had  every  mediaeval  detail  at  his 
command.  Had  the  author  of  Ivanhoe  been  as 


OF   WONDER  277 

truly  mediaeval  as  the  author  of  Sidonia,  he 
would  have  appealed  to  a  leisured  few  by  whom 
the  past  is  more  beloved  than  the  present ;  but 
he  would  not  have  given  the  English-speaking 
race  those  superb  works  of  his  which  are 

"  A  largess  universal  like  the  sun." 

Though  the  Ettrick  shepherd,  in  The  Queen's 
Wake,  shows  plenty  of  the  true  feeling  for  the 
supernatural  side  of  the  movement,  he  had  not 
even  in  Bonnie  Kilmanny  sufficient  governance 
over  his  vivid  imagination  to  express  himself 
with  that  concentrated  energy  which  is  one  of 
the  first  requisites  of  all  poetry. 

As  to  Wordsworth  as  a  nature-poet,  there  are, 
of  course,  three  attitudes  of  the  poet  towards 
Nature.  There  is  Wordsworth's  attitude — that 
which  recognises  her  as  Natura  Benigna  ;  there 
is  the  attitude  which  recognises  her  as  Natura 
Maligna,  that  of  the  poet  who  by  temperament 
exclaims  with  the  Syrian  Gnostics,  '  Matter  is 
darkness — matter  is  evil,  and  of  matter  is  this 
body,  and  to  become  incarnate  is  to  inherit 
sorrow  and  grievous  pain '  ;  and  there  is  the 
attitude  which  recognises  her  as  being  neither 
benign  nor  malignant,  but  the  cold,  passionless, 
unloving  mother  to  whom  the  sorrows,  fears, 


278  THE   RENASCENCE 

and  aspirations  of  man  are  indifferent  because 
unknown — the  attitude,  in  a  word,  of  Matthew 
Arnold  in  his  poem  '  In  harmony  with  Nature/ 
and  other  recent  poets  who  have  written  after 
the  general  acceptance  of  the  evolutionary 
hypothesis. 

Wordsworth's  influence  in  regard  to  the 
painting  of  Nature  was  no  doubt  great  upon  all 
the  poets  of  his  time,  and  upon  none  was  it 
greater  than  upon  Byron,  who  scoffed  at  him. 
In  order  to  see  Wordsworth's  influence  upon 
Byron  we  have  only  to  compare  the  third  and 
fourth  cantos  of  Childe  Harold  with  the  first 
and  second.  But  besides  this,  Byron  was 
evidently  in  the  later  decade  of  his  life  a  student 
of  Wordsworth's  theories  as  to  the  use  of 
natural  language  instead  of  poetic  diction.  In 
Julia's  letter  in  Don  Juan,  notwithstanding 
occasional  echoes  such  as  that  of  a  couplet  by 
an  obscure  writer,  Barton  Booth — 

So  shakes  the  needle,  and  so  stands  the  pole, 
As  vibrates  my  fond  heart  to  my  fixed  soul — 

is  an  admirable  illustration  of  Wordsworth's 
aphorism,  '  What  comes  from  the  heart  goes 
to  the  heart.'  The  same  may  be  said  concerning 
the  pathetic  naturalness  of  the  Haide*e  episode. 


OF  WONDER  279 

Would  this  ever  have  been  written  as  we  now 
have  it  had  it  not  been  for  Wordsworth's 
Preface  ?  Byron's  success  in  passionate  writing 
seems  to  have  left  behind  it  the  strange  notion 
that  because  there  is  such  a  thing  as  the  fine 
frenzy  of  the  poet,  the  more  frenzy  the  better. 
But  what  makes  Byron  an  important  figure  in 
the  romantic  revival  is  that,  while  his  own 
draughts  of  romanticism  were  drawn  from  the 
well-springs  of  Scott,  Wordsworth  and  Cole- 
ridge, it  was  from  Byron's  own  reservoir  that 
the  French  Romantiques  drank.  Indeed  it  may 
almost  be  said  that  to  his  influence  was  largely 
due  that  revival  which,  according  to  Banville, 
"  made  French  poetry  leap  from  the  sixteenth 
century  to  the  nineteenth." 

Sou  they 's  voluminous  and  industrious  work 
upon  romantic  lines  is  receiving  at  this  moment 
less  attention  than  it  deserves.  There  is  really 
a  fine  atmosphere  of  romance  thrown  over 
Thalaba  and  the  Curse  of  Kehama.  But  the 
atmosphere  is  cold.  His  experiments  in  rhyme- 
less  metre  are  far  from  being  unworthy  of 
attention,  especially  as  they  were  imitated 
(sometimes  not  very  successfully)  by  Shelley, 
Matthew  Arnold,  W.  E.  Henley,  and  notably 
by  the  interesting  poet,  William  Sharp  (Fiona 
Macleod).  Shelley  preceded  Keats  by  three 
years,  but  it  is  convenient  in  this  survey  to  take 
Keats  first  in  regard  to  this  subject,  as  we  have 


280  THE  RENASCENCE 

a  great  deal  to  say  upon  the  influence  of  Shelley 
upon  certain  poets  of  a  subsequent  date. 

Tennyson  for  the  most  part  resisted  the 
influence  of  Shelley,  but  was  greatly  influenced 
by  the  blended  colour  and  music  of  Keats.  The 
present  writer  has  elsewhere  dwelt  upon  the 
fact  that,  brief  as  was  Keats's  life,  he  who 
had  already  passed  through  so  many  halls  of  the 
poetic  palace  was  at  one  time  passing  into  yet 
another — the  magic  hall  of  Coleridge  and  the 
old  ballads.  As  expressions  of  the  highest 
romantic  temper  there  are  not  many  things  in 
our  literature  to  be  set  above  The  Eve  of  St. 
Mark,  and  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci. 

Shelley's  place  in  the  Renascence  of  Wonder 
is  peculiar.  His  vigorous  imagination  was  parti- 
ally strangled  by  his  humanitarianism  and 
ethical  impulse,  inherited  largely  from  Rousseau. 
Of  all  the  poets  of  this  group  he  was  by  far  the 
most  inspired  b)'  the  social  upheaval  of  the 
French  Revolution,  and,  of  course,  apart  from 
his  splendid  work  in  so  many  kinds  of  poetry, 
he  is  a  very  important  figure  in  the  revival  of 
romanticism  broadly  considered.  But  those 
poems  of  his  dealing  with  subjects  akin  to 
those  represented  by  the  purely  romantic  work 
of  the  old  ballads,  Christabel  and  The  Ancient 
Mariner  show  that  in  the  Renascence  of  Won- 
der his  place  is  not  among  the  first.  Queen 
Mab  is  not  the  least  in  touch  with  the  spiritual 
world.  And  there  is  more  of  the  pure  romantic 
glamour  in  Keats's  two  lines — 

"  Charmed  magic  casements  opening  on  the  foam 
Of  perilous  seas,  in  faery  lands  forlorn  " — 


OF  WONDER  281 

than  in  the  whole  of  The  Witch  of  Atlas.  It  is, 
however,  in  the  effect  of  Shelley's  writings  upon 
certain  poets  who  succeeded  him  that  his  in- 
fluence is  so  curious. 

After  Shelley's  music  began  to  captivate  the 
world  certain  poets  set  to  work  upon  the  theory 
that  between  themselves  and  the  other  portion 
of  the  human  race  there  is  a  wide  gulf  fixed. 
Their  theory,  in  short,  was  that  they  are  to 
sing,  as  far  as  possible,  like  birds  of  another 
world.  Indeed,  it  may  be  said  that  in  Philip 
James  Bailey,  Sydney  Dobell  and  Alexander 
Smith,  all  true  poets,  and  the  first  narrowly 
escaping  becoming  great,  wonder  ran  to  seed, 
while  "  acceptance  "  shrank  to  a  fearfully  minus 
quantity.  It  might  also  be  said  that  the  poetic 
atmosphere  became  that  of  the  supreme  Palace 
of  Wonder — Bedlam. 

With  regard  to  Bailey's  endowments,  there 
are  passages  in  his  tremendous  poem  of '  Festus  ' 
which  fully  justify  all  that  his  contemporaries, 
including  Tennyson,  prophesied  for  him. 

As  to  Sydney  Dobell,  he,  in  "  Balder  "  far  out- 
shot  Bailey  in  extravagance,  and  Alexander 
Smith,  whose  ambition  was— 

"  To  shoot  a  poem  like  a  comet  out, 
Far  splendering  the  sleepy  realms  of  night  " — 

tried  to  outshoot  Dobell,  while  Stanyan  Bigg 
tried  to  outshoot  them  all. 

But  the  strange  thing  is  that  these  writers 
of  Bedlamite  poetry  were  not  Bedlamites  at  all, 
but  men  of  great  common  sense.  This  is  seen 
in  Dobell's  Edinburgh  lecture  upon  poetry, 


282  THE   RENASCENCE 

in  which  he  said  admirably,  that  the  poet  must 
be  "  the  man  with  the  perfect  mind,"  and  that 
"  the  poem  is  the  perfect  expression  of  that 
perfect  mind  "  ;  yet  in  "  Balder,"  Dobell,  and 
in  the  "  Life  Drama  "  Alexander  Smith  pro- 
duced each  a  poem  so  exactly  like  a  Bedlamite's 
poem,  that  nothing  will  ever  now  persuade 
the  reader  of  this  generation  that  they  were  not 
each  more  or  less  mad.  They  were  on  the 
contrary,  among  the  sanest  men  of  their  time, 
and  the  reason  why  "  Balder  "  and  the  "  Life 
Drama  "  read  like  a  Bedlamite's  poems  is  this, 
that  the  writers  deliberately  tried  to  make 
them  read  so.  And  so  poets  of  our  own  day  are 
apt  to  forget  in  their  worship  of  Shelley,  that, 
admitting  Dobell's  theory  about  the  poet's 
"  perfect  mind,"  the  question  still  is,  What 
kind  of  mind  is  the  perfect  mind  ?  Is  it  that 
mind  which,  like  the  mind  of  Homer,  of  Sopho- 
cles, of  Shakespeare,  of  Goethe,  is  in  accord 
with  the  healthy  mind  of  general  humanity  ? 
or  is  it  that  mind  which  is  in  accord  with  noth- 
ing, not  even  with  itself  and  the  phantasms 
of  its  own  conjuring  ? 

The  country  from  which  the  followers  of 
Shelley  sing  to  our  lower  world  was  admirably 
named  "  Nowhere  "  by  Bailey.  And  one  of  the 
most  striking  scenes  of  "  Festus  "  would  seem  to 
show  that  "  Nowhere  "  is  a  country  of  remark- 
able geographical  peculiarities. 

Browning's  Sordello  seems  to  be  laid  in  this 
country  of  "  Nowhere,"  and  there  are  other 
splendid  successes  in  this  direction,  but  he  soon 
left  the  region. 


OF  WONDER  283 

In  such  poems  as  "La  Saisiaz  "  he  is  apt  to 
fall  into  the  mistake  which  spoilt  Hamlet's  life 
— that  of  trying  to  make  the  best  of  both  these 
worlds. 

Nineteenth  century  poets  finding  that  they 
have  two  places  to  think  about  at  once — the 
physical  universe,  and  that  which  is  beyond 
the  physical  universe — cannot  determine  which 
they  will  claim  for  inheritance.  Having  these 
two  "  wheres,"  "  Somewhere "  and  "  No- 
where," upon  which  to  exercise  their  "  perfect 
minds,"  they  are  vexed  by  an  '  embarras  de 
richesses.' 

Both  these  inferences  are,  however,  wrong. 
First,  there  is  no  reason  whatever  why  a  poet 
should  be  madder  than  the  rest  of  us ;  and, 
secondly,  so  far  from  "  Nowhere "  being  his 
proper  singing  gallery,  if  ever  there  was  a 
vocalist  whose  place  is  especially  and  peculiarly 
"  Somewhere,"  that  vocalist  is  the  poet.  "  Some- 
where "  being  the  poet's  home,  the  most  awk- 
ward results  naturally  follow  if  the  poet  wanders, 
as  so  many  poets  of  the  romantic  school  do 
wander,  into  "  Nowhere." 

As  regards,  however,  the  French  romantigues 
of  the  thirties  to  whom  Banville  alludes — those 
whose  revolt  against  French  classicism  cul- 
minated, perhaps,  in  that  great  battle  of  Hernani 
before  mentioned — their  revolt  was  even  more 
imperfectly  equipped  with  knowledge  of  the 
physiognomy  of  mediae valism  than  that  of  Scott. 

With  regard  to  Victor  Hugo,  however,  it  may 


284  THE   RENASCENCE 

be  said  that,  modern  as  he  was  in  temper,  he 
was  able  by  aid  of  his  splendid  imagination  in 
La  Pas  d'Armes  du  Roi  Jean,  and  indeed  in 
many  other  poems,  to  feel  and  express  the  true 
Renascence  of  Wonder.  But  while  in  poetry 
the  mere  physiognomy  of  life  is  only  suggested, 
in  prose  it  has  to  be  secured. 

Hugo  never  secured  it.  His  faculty  of  wonder, 
indeed,  seems  to  have  grown  with  the  years,  for  in 
the  second  series  of  La  L&gende  des  Si&des  pub- 
lished in  his  seventy-fifth  year,  depicting  a  certain 
tremendous  struggle  "  Entre  Grants  et  Dieux," 
he  gives  us  a  picture  of  the  giant  Phtos,  manacled 
and  buried  under  Olympus  by  the  usurping 
gods.  Phtos  breaks  a  hole  through  the  bottom 
of  the  mountain,  and  sees  certain  sights  which 
for  wonder  surpass  all  the  wonderful  sights  seen 
by  all  our  English  poets  put  together. 


"  Phtos  est  a  la  fen£tre  immense  du  mystefe. 
It  voil  1'autre  cot6  monstrueux  de  la  terre, 
L'inconnu,  ce  qu'  aucun  regard  ne  vit  jamais, 
Des  profondeurs  qui  sont  en  me'me  temps  sommets 
Un  tas  d'astres  derriere  un  gouffre  d'empyre'es, 
Un  ocean  roulant  aux  plis  de  ses  marges, 
Des  flux  et  des  reflux  de  constellation." 


This  in  fact,  is  that  famous  "  1'Infini,"  about 
which  the  venerable  poet  is  calculated  to  have 
written  from  the  publication  of  "  Irtamlne " 
downwards,  fifty  thousand  epigrams. 


OF  WONDER  285 

"  Un  globe  est  une  balle,  un  siecle  est  un  moment ; 
Mondes  sur  mondes,   1'un  par  1'autre  ils  se  limitent. 
****** 

O  Stupeur !  il  finit  par  distinguer,  au  fond 

De  ce  gouffre,  ou  le  jour  avec  la  nuit  se  fond, 

A    travers    I'^paisseur,    d'une    brane    e*ternelle, 

Dans  on  ne  sait  quelle  ombre  enorme,  une  prunelle." 

Phtos  then  scales  Olympus,  and  frightens  the 
gods  by  crying  out,  "  O,  dieux,  il  est  un  Dieu  !  " 

Our  object  being  merely  to  trace  to  its  sources 
that  stream  of  Romanticism  upon  which  the 
poetry  of  the  nineteenth  century  has  been 
nourished,  this  work  should  properly  close  here. 
And  if  a  word  or  two  is  said  upon  the  poets  who 
immediately  followed  the  great  group,  it  must 
not  be  supposed  that  any  general  criticism  of 
these  latter  poets  is  attempted. 

It  was  inevitable,  no  doubt,  that  Tennyson, 
a  poet  so  absolutely  voicing  the  Victorian  age 
and  its  narrow  cosmogony,  who  alone  seemed 
to  speak  for  that  age,  should  suffer  considerable 
decadence  of  fame  the  moment  that  a  new 
epoch  with  a  new  cosmogony  should  begin  to 
clamour  for  utterance,  and  undoubtedly  this 
has  been  the  case.  Yet  in  virtue  of  the  large 
mass  of  perfect  work  actually  done  he  would 
perhaps  be  the  greatest  poet  of  the  nineteenth 
century  if  Coleridge  had  not  left  us  among  his 
own  large  mass  of  inferior  work  half-a-dozen 


286  THE   RENASCENCE 

poems  which  will  be  the  delight,  the  wonder, 
and  the  despair  of  English  poets  in  all  time  to 
come.  In  the  blending  of  music  and  colour  so 
that  each  seems  born  of  each,  it  is  hard  to 
think  that  even  the  poet  of  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes 
and  The  Ode  to  a  Nightingale  was  the  superior 
of  him  who  gave  us  The  Lady  of  Shalott  and 
The  Lotos-Eaters.  But  when  it  comes  to  the 
true  romantic  glamour  it  cannot  be  said  that 
he  was  instinctively  in  touch  with  the  old 
spirit.  The  magnificent  Idylls  of  the  King,  in 
temper  as  well  as  in  style  one  of  the  most 
modern  poems  of  its  time,  does  occasionally,  as 
in  the  picture  of  the  finding  of  Arthur,  give  us 
the  old  glamour  very  finely.  But  the  stately 
rhetorical  movement  of  his  blank  verse  is 
generally  out  of  harmony  with  it.  That  roman- 
tic suggestion  which  Shakespeare's  blank  verse 
catches  in  such  writing  as  we  get  in  the  fifth  act 
of  The  Merchant  of  Venice,  in  Pericles,  and  in 
hundreds  of  other  passages,  shows,  however,  that 
blank  verse,  though  not  so  '  right '  in  romantic 
poetry  as  rhyme,  can  yet  be  made  sufficiently 
flexible.  It  is  only  in  the  poetic  methods  of 
his  rhymed  poems  that  Tennyson  successfully 
worked  on  romantic  lines,  though  of  course  the 
the  fairy-like,  unconscious  grace  of 


OF  WONDER  287 

Coleridge  at  his  best,  were  never  caught  by  any 
of  his  successors.  And  yet  above  all  nineteenth- 
century  poets  Tennyson  is  steeped  in  the 
absolute  humour  of  romanticism.  In  Shakes- 
peare himself  there  is  no  finer  example  of 
absolute  humour  than  he  gives  us  in  those  lines 
where  the  "  Northern  Farmer  "  expresses  his 
views  on  the  immorality  of  Bessy  Harris  : 

Bessy  Harris's  barne  !  tha  knaws  she  laaid  it  to  mea. 
Mowt  a  bean,  mayhap,  for  she  wur  a  bad  un,  shea. 
'Siver,  I  kep  'um,  I  kep  'um,  my  lass,  tha  mun  understand, 
I  done  moy  duty  boy  'um  as  I  'a  done  boy  the  lond. 

As  to  Browning,  in  order  to  discuss  adequately 
his  place  as  regards  the  Renascence  of  Wonder 
a  long  treatise  would  be  required.  On  the 
realistic  side  of  the  Romantic  movement  he  is, 
of  course,  very  strong.  His  sympathies,  how- 
ever, are  as  modern  as  Matthew  Arnold's  own, 
except,  of  course,  on  the  theological  side,  where 
he  is  a  century  behind  his  great  poetic  con- 
temporaries. His  desire  is  to  express  not  wonder 
but  knowingness,  the  opposite  of  wonder.  In 
a  study  of  his  works,  made  by  the  present 
writer  many  years  ago,  the  humour  of  Browning 
was  named  Teutonic  grotesque.  The  name  is 
convenient,  and  nearly,  though  not  quite, 
satisfactory.  Perhaps  Teutonic  grotesque,  which 


288  THE   RENASCENCE 

in  architecture  at  least,  lies  in  the  expression  of 
deep  ideas  through  fantastic  forms,  is  the  only 
absolute  grotesque.  In  Italian  and  French 
grotesque  the  incongruity  throughout  all  art  lies 
in  a  simple  departure  from  the  recognised  line 
of  beauty,  spiritual  or  physical ;  but  in  the 
Teutonic  mind  the  instinctive  quest  is  really  not 
— save  in  music — beauty  at  all,  but  the  wonder- 
ful, the  profound,  the  mysterious ;  and  the 
incongruity  of  Teutonic  grotesque  lies  in  ex- 
pressing the  emotions  aroused  by  these  qualities 
in  forms  that  are  unexpected  and  bizarre.  It 
is  easy,  however,  to  give  too  much  heed  to 
Browning's  grotesquery  in  considering  his  re- 
lation to  Romanticism.  Ruskin  has  affirmed 
that  such  poems  as  The  Bishop  Orders  his  Tomb 
is  the  best  rendering  to  be  found  in  literature 
of  the  old  temper,  and  on  this  point  Ruskin 
speaks  with  authority. 

With  regard  to  Matthew  Arnold,  in  The 
Scholar  Gypsy  he  undoubtedly  shows,  reflected 
from  Wordsworth,  a  good  deal  of  the  realistic 
side  of  Romanticism.  But  there  is  no  surer  sign 
that  his  temper  was  really  "  Augustan  "  than 
the  fact  that  in  his  selections  from  Gray  in 
Ward's  English  Poets,  he  actually  omits  the  one 
stanza  in  Gray's  Elegy,  which  shows  him  to  have 


OF  WONDER  289 

been  a  true  poet — the  stanza  about  the  robin, 
above  quoted  in  the  remarks  upon  Gray.  The 
Forsaken  Merman,  whose  very  name  suggests 
the  Renascence  of  Wonder,  beautiful  as  it  is, 
is  quite  without  the  glamour  and  magic  of  such 
second-rate  poets  as  the  author  of  the  Queen's 
Wake,  and  has  no  kinship  with  Coleridge  or  the 
old  ballads.  As  to  his  attitude  towards  Nature, 
it  is  in  such  poems  as  Morality  and  In  Harmony 
with  Nature  that  Arnold  shows  that  he  comes 
under  the  third  category  of  nature-poets  above 
mentioned.  With  regard  to  his  humour,  Arnold 
was  essentially  a  man  of  the  world — of  the 
very  modern  world — and  his  humour,  though 
peculiarly  delicate  and  delightful,  must  cer- 
tainly be  called  relative  and  not  absolute. 

As  regards  the  romantic  temper,  two  English 
imaginative  writers  only  have  combined  a  true 
sympathy  with  a  true  knowledge  of  it,  and 
these  were  of  more  recent  date — Rossetti  and 
William  Morris.  They  had,  of  course,  immense 
advantages  owing  to  such  predecessors  in 
literature  as  Meinhold,  and  also  to  the  attention 
that  had  been  given  to  the  subject  in  Pugin's 
Gothic  Architecture  and  in  the  works  of  other 
architects,  English  and  foreign. 

The  poet  of  Christabel  himself  was  scarcely 


290  THE   RENASCENCE 

more  steeped  in  the  true  magic  of  the  romantic 
temper  than  was  the  writer  of  The  Blessed 
Damozel  and  Sister  Helen,  while  in  the  know- 
ledge of  romance  Coleridge  was  far  behind  the 
later  poet.  With  regard  to  humour,  Rossetti 
and  Morris  hold  in  their  poetry  no  place  either 
with  the  absolute  or  relative  humorists,  but 
those  who  knew  them  intimately  can  affirm 
that  personally  they  are  both  humorists  of  a 
very  fine  order. 

The  truth  is,  as  already  mentioned,  that 
Rossetti  consciously,  and  Morris,  perhaps  uncon- 
sciously, worked  upon  the  entirely  mistaken 
theory  that  in  romantic  poetry  humour  has  pro- 
perly no  place.  Those  who  have  styled  Morris 
unhealthy  on  account  of  his  lamentations  about 
Death  are  inconsistent.  He  was  as  healthy  as 
Chaucer  himself.  "  It  is  the  characteristic  of  every 
conscious  organism  in  health  to  want  to  live," 
says  a  great  naturalist.  Surely  it  is  the  sign 
of  a  perfectly  healthy  mind  to  lament  now  and 
then  that  the  time  is  approaching  faster  and 
faster  when  the  good  things  of  this  comfort- 
able earth  will  be  at  an  end — when  there  will  be 
no  more  making  of  verses — no  more  pleasant 
translating  of  Sagas — no  more  Icelandic  trips- 
no  more  companionship  of  friends — and  even, 
perhaps,  no  more  "  sage  greens."  "  The  deep 
dishonour  of  death "  aroused  the  honest  in- 
dignation of  Shakespeare ;  and  he  surpasses 
Morris  in  the  amount  of  abuse  he  pours  upon  the 
"  spoiler  of  life's  feast."  In  fact,  the  genuine 


OF    WONDER  291 

gusto  with  which  Morris  gives  vent  to  his  wrath 
against  Death  convinces  us  that,  besides  being 
one  of  the  most  delightful  poets  that  ever  lived 
(and  also  one  of  the  greatest  if  we  properly 
consider  what  gifts  went  to  the  writing  of 
'  Sigurd '),  he  is  one  of  the  healthiest,  in  the 
sense  that  an  old  Viking  or  an  old  Greek  was 
healthy  who  loved  life  and  detested,  though  he 
might  not  fear,  death. 

Into  this  mistake  George  Meredith  never  fell 
and  certainly  he  is  the  last  poet  who  can  be 
called  a  "  poet  of  acceptance."  Still  he  does 
not  belong  in  the  same  way  to  the  Renascence 
of  Wonder  as  Morris,  Swinburne,  and  Rossetti 
do.  His  early  book  "  Modern  Love,"  is  a 
delight  to  all  readers,  full  of  true  passion  and 
true  everything.  But  it  cannot  be  said  that  he 
fulfilled  the  promise  of  his  early  work.  In  many 
of  his  later  poems,  the  beautiful  image  seems 
struggling  and  iridescent,  like  a  fish  in  a  net. 

The  difference  between  literature  and  mere 
word-joining  is  that  while  literature  is  alive, 
word-joining  is  without  life,  and  cannot  by  any 
power  be  vivified.  This  literary  life  is  bi- 
partite in  prose,  tri-partite  in  poetry  ;  that  is 
to  say,  that  while  prose  requires  intellectual  life 
and  emotional  life,  poetry  requires  not  only 
intellectual  life  and  emotional  life,  but  rhythmic 
life,  this  last  being  the  most  important  of  all. 

Unless  the  rhythm  of  any  metrical  passage 
is  so  vigorous,  so  natural,  and  so  free  that  it 
seems,  like  Swinburne's  poetry,  as  though  it 
could  live,  if  need  were,  by  its  rhythm  alone, 
that  passage  has  no  right  to  existence,  and 


292  THE   RENASCENCE 

should,  if  the  substance  is  good,  be  forthwith 
demetricized  and  turned  into  honest  prose ;  for, 
as  Thoreau  has  pointed  out,  prose  at  its  best 
has  high  qualities  beyond  the  reach  and  ken  of 
poetry,  and  to  compensate  for  the  sacrifice  of 
these  the  metrical  gains  of  any  passage  should 
be  beyond  all  cavil. 

In  a  language  so  powerful  and  yet  so  rude  as 
ours — a  language  requiring  such  an  infinity  of 
manipulation  before  it  can  be  worked  into 
melodious  sequences — the  difficulty  of  producing 
poetry  that  is  at  once  perfect  in  art  and  adequate 
to  the  motive  and  intellectual  power  of  the 
national  character  is  enormous. 

A  Greek  of  the  time  of  Pericles  might  have 
nourished  his  genius  upon  all  that  the  broadest 
Athenian  life  could  afford,  and  yet  so  inherently 
melodious  was  his  mother-tongue,  he  could  have 
given  in  his  verses  all  those  subtle  nuances  of 
metrical  effect  which  in  more  imperfect  lan- 
guages are  the  result  of  a  lifelong  study  of 
poetry  as  a  fine  art.  But,  save  in  the  cases  of  a 
few  of  the  most  illustrious  names,  the  poets  of 
England,  and  especially  the  poets  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  fail  from  that  lack  of  experience 
of  life  without  which  poetry  is  but  the  idle 
tinkling  of  the  lyre ;  or  else,  having  that  ex- 
perience of  life,  they  fail  because  they  have  no 
time  to  overcome  the  countless  technical  diffi- 
culties and  metrical  delicacies  of  poetic  art. 

Meredith  had  something  of  an  ear  for  iambic 
verse,  though  none  for  anapaestic,  and  yet,  for 
some  reason  or  another,  he  is  fond  of  attempting 
anapaests. 


OF  WONDER 

There  is  no  more  clear  and  sharp  distinction 
between  poets  than  that  which  divides  them 
between  poets  who  have  the  iambic  ear,  and 
poets  who  have  the  anapaestic.  While  writers 
like  Keats  and  Wordsworth  in  passing  from  the 
iambic  to  the  anapaestic  movement  pass  at  once 
into  doggerel,  writers  like  Shelley  and  Swin- 
burne are  so  entirely  at  home  in  anapaestic 
movements  that  even  their  iambic  lines  seem 
always  on  the  verge  of  leaping  into  the  ana- 
paestic dance. 

(If  verse  were  simply  quintessential  prose,  then 
assuredly  Meredith  would  be  one  of  the  most 
effective  poets  in  English  literature.  In  the  art 
of  "  packing  a  line  "  he  is  almost  without  an 
equal.  Take  the  following  stanzas  from  the 
poem  called  "  Earth  and  Man." 

He  may  entreat,  aspire, 

He  may  despair,  and  she  has  never  heed. 

She  drinking  his  warm  sweat  will  soothe  his  need, 
Not  his  desire. 
She  prompts  him  to  rejoice, 

Yet  scares  him  on  the  threshold  with  the  shroud. 

He  deems  her  cherishing  of  her  best-endowed, 
A  wanton's  choice. 

The  first  two  lines  here  are  much  more  than 
quintessential  prose,  they  are  poetry  worthy 
of  almost  any  writer  in  the  English  language. 
But  the  lines  which  follow  are  metrically  bad, 
and  bad  in  the  worst  way,  for  they  show  that 
the  poet  whose  natural  instinct,  judging  from 
his  "  Modern  Love,"  is  to  avoid  elision  and  to 
spread  out  the  syllables  of  his  lines  after  Keats' s 
fashion,  attempts  an  elision  here  without  under- 


294  THE  RENASCENCE 

standing  what  is  the  true  nature  and  function  of 
elision  in  English  poetry.  And  throughout  his 
poetry  there  are  lines  which  strike  upon  the  ear 
like  flints  : — 

She  fancied,  armed  beyond  beauty,  and  thence  grew, 
In  mind  only,  and  the  perils  that  ensue. 
Hear,   then,    my  friend,    madam  1    Tongue-restrained  he 
stands. 

Still,  notwithstanding  all  the  rugged  lines  in 
Meredith's  poetry,  there  are  plenty  of  poems  of 
his  which  easily  show  that  he  has  a  true  call  to 
express  himself  in  metre.  Perhaps  "  The  Lark 
Ascending "  is  the  finest  of  all  these,  though, 
of  course,  even  that  is  without  the  supreme 
metrical  inspiration  of  Shelley's  "  Skylark  "  and 
Swinburne's  "  Sea  Mew."  And  this  is  no  faint 
praise,  for  among  those  who  express,  or  en- 
deavour to  express,  themselves  in  metre,  how 
many  have  really  a  call  to  do  so  ? 

Nothing  is  more  inscrutable  than  the  desire 
for  metrical  expression.  Carlyle's  endowment  of 
some  of  the  poetic  qualities — such  as  imagina- 
tion, picturesqueness,  emotive  eloquence — was 
very  great ;  but  judging  from  his  own  doggerel 
verses  and  his  ignorant  and  stupid  talk  about 
Keats  and  Shelley,  his  ear  for  music  was  the  ear 
of  Bully  Bottom  after  he  had  been  translated. 

Compare,  for  instance,  the  poems  of  O' 
Shaughnessy  with  Meredith's  poems.  So  rugged, 
harsh,  and  flinty  are  many  of  Meredith's  lines 
that  the  reading  of  them  would  have  inflicted 
positive  physical  pain  on  O' Shaughnessy 's  ear. 
Yet  we  do  not  hesitate  to  say  that  one  or  two  of 
Meredith's  poems  contain  more  of  the  raw 


OF  WONDER  295 

material  of  poetry  than  could  have  been  pro- 
duced by  O'Shaughnessy  in  a  lifetime. 

The  throb  of  emotional  and  intellectual  life 
stirs  nearly  every  line  ;  whereas  in  O'Shaugh- 
nessy's  verses  we  often  find  nothing  but  that 
rhythmic  life  without  which  no  metrical  writing 
has  any  raison  d'etre  at  all. 

The  truth  is  that  in  modern  England  poetry 
is  not  large  enough  for  the  growing  limbs  of  life 
or  rather  our  poetic  forms  are  not  large  enough 
to  cover  the  limbs  of  life  and  the  limbs  of  art. 
Sir  William  Temple's  comparison  of  life  to  a 
blanket  too  small  for  the  bed  was  never  so 
applicable  as  now.  In  order  to  pull  it  over  one 
part  of  our  bodies  another  part  has  to  be  left 
out  in  the  cold. 

Manliness  and  intellectual  vigour  combined 
with  a  remarkable  picturesqueness  are  the  most 
noticeable  qualities  of  Meredith's  work. 

It  is  hard  to  think  that  even  the  singer  of  the 
Ode  to  the  West  Wind  is  in  lyric  power  greater 
than  he  who  wrote  the  choruses  of  Atalanta 
and  the  still  more  superb  measures  of  Songs 
before  Sunrise  and  Erechtheus.  Indeed,  we  have 
only  to  recall  the  fact  that  before  Shelley  wrote 
it  was  an  axiom  among  poets  and  critics  that 
few,  if  any,  more  metres  could  ever  be  invented 
in  order  to  give  his  proper  place  to  a  poet  who 
has  invented  more  metres  than  all  the  poets 
combined  from  the  author  of  Piers  Plowman 
down  to  the  present  day, 


296  THE   RENASCENCE 

Swinburne,  too,  seems,  consciously  or  un- 
consciously, to  act  upon  the  theory  that  humour 
is  out  of  place  in  romantic  poetry.  For  in  his 
prose  writings  he  shows  a  great  deal  of  wit 
and  humour.  With  regard  to  form  and  artistic 
qualities  generally,  a  new  kind  of  poetic  diction 
now  grew  up — a  diction  composed  mainly  of  that 
of  Shelley  and  of  Keats,  of  Tennyson,  of  Rossetti, 
of  Swinburne,  yet  mixed  with  Elizabethan  and 
more  archaic  forms — a  diction,  to  be  sure,  far 
more  poetic  in  its  elements  than  that  which 
Coleridge,  Scott,  and  Wordsworth  did  so  much 
to  demolish,  but  none  the  less  artificial  when 
manipulated  by  a  purely  artistic  impulse  for  the 
production  of  purely  artistic  verse.  It  is,  we 
say,  true  enough  that  the  gorgeous  and  beauti- 
ful word-spinning  of  writers  like  Arthur  O' 
Shaughnessy,  Philip  Bourke  Marston,  and  those 
called  the  Pre-Raphaelite  poets  is  far  more  like 
genuine  poetry  than  was  the  worn-out,  tawdry 
texture  of  eighteenth-century  platitudes  in  which 
Hayley  and  Samuel  Jackson  Pratt  bedecked 
their  puny  limbs.  Rossetti,  the  great  master  of 
this  kind  of  poetic  diction,  saw  this,  and  during 
the  last  few  years  of  his  life  endeavoured  to 
get  away  from  it  when  writing  his  superb  poems, 
A  King's  Tragedy,  and  The  White  Ship. 

THE    END 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY,  LOS  ANGELES 

COLLEGE  LIBRARY 

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